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

What were you what were you explaining about how Europe is like Android and America's like iOS. Yeah. Yeah It has a lot of better features in many ways but iOS is just yeah This work just works. Um, even the small one all this sucker in was in you going forward you pull it toward you Oh we was in What do we move it towards you okay Sorry, it's early We was in 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 Street coffee Yeah, and they go you off like three things and it's purely we're gonna 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 Will 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 the person who takes the orders I'm like, this is really strange But 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. Were 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 a big arbitrage. That sounds like my dream, but I think 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 Because of tipping because you have millions of people that's not like these mini entrepreneurs. They've gaslight 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 work you're kidding But that's not the etymology. That's what I was that's retroactive I mean, it definitely works. All right, Jack. I I've been needing to ask you about this. What the fuck is happening with this John Phil guy? You know, 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 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 chasm guys have seen this, right? I saw this yesterday. Are you been in Android for too long? This is the whole thing George at the private equity. Yeah, that's you trying to get good service up a guy that's giving you water And from this he's like doing a coin Yeah, I I'm actually maybe I'm maybe I'm ill-informed in it by he doesn't exist does he it's a it is a I 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 and then down ruling upon derivative content now where people are making like counterfeit AI of that AI and it's I guess, you know You can say do you own your own likeness? But do you own your AI's own likeness is much more of a difficult question a Gucci bag of this guy Yeah, well, it's the fake Gucci bag of the fake Gucci bag, right? Like you've made a you've made a mockery of my mockery. Yeah, I don't know between this and hunter Biden's laptop coin. Um What it's not looking good Really the world of crypto. I'm holding diamond hands with my millennia coin. So you really say yeah, let's wait and say well You know what's interesting in the last like 24 48 hours. There's this thing. That's Taken over Twitter shine. 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 gets permissionlessly launched off the back of some conversation or trend and then the person that started that trend 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 I'm attached to this or I'm not and This in the last couple weeks this X money, you know, they're like payment infrastructure on X So in the US 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. I 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 I got 13 grand I have 70 grand sitting here because like I made this video and somebody like attach my name to it And then it became this there was but those men are doing it as a honey trap Oh like a sense to try and real I mean, oh imagine how much money you could get if you were properly involved with this It's you liquidating you with a billion dollars actually the Number one like the dog coins like Shiba Inu and all those dog coins. Yeah, there's doge it was Shiva there this people started creating more doge coins because why not and They realized well people's your crypto wallet like the it's like 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 So they just sent it to Vitalik the creator of aetherium 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. Yeah, 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. And then people are just like losing money on the way down to you Just donate it all to India and gave a billion dollars to like an Indian nonprofit and that was the end of it Like a lot of good actually happened from one of these at the beginning. So could you if some you if somebody sends you It 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 and that's you know, I know it's free money doing not for me. Thank you but 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 English 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 can 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 it all just goes back to cash and you then get swing so far the other way I'm very down for a cash based society again. There's an ex-club promoter. I love the idea Williamson um, I heard of a professional gambler who his hedge because in the UK Gambling proceeds are completely tax-free. Mm-hmm. So there's like some of the highest if you look at the highest Net worth in the UK a lot of them are like the lady who runs bet 365 But when you 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 But if you're actual gambler yourself, you don't pay anything on your proceeds and somebody who made a fortune in gambling He would create a lot of algorithms like almost run 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 ever with like multiple phones in their hand and they're trying to like catch the result before it gets reported Charging time. Yeah, they have to be you know, like on millisecond delay to capture that like slight I'm sure there's a little while ago. Maybe about five or ten years ago 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 better in and just arbitrage like I know what's going to happen and the exchange or whatever Hasn't caught up to it. Just pretty fun. It's the human betting equivalent of moving your stock at your Trading company closer down Manhattan towards where the actual exchange is. Yeah, there's a good there was a good A Instance of this like right when the poly market stuff came out originally for weather and you could bet on like the temperature in Paris Today didn't some guy use a hair dryer No, no, no, it was the the bet was good for it's like CCTV footage of it It's great. Will will the temperature in Paris like at Charles de Gaulle Airport, and that's what I said reports it great break 20 degrees or 21 degrees Celsius and the 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 cannot 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 a way like I cut you can't influence the size of my watermelons this summer or something like That you know Wow Is there a thing around when you're kind of being reflexive with poly market 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 is I think they like have to honor these and then they they update their because 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 gonna 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 But it's not illegal to do they've got like a whatever Enforcement and safety team or an enforcement and fairness team I watched a documentary about poly market and Kal she 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 but there 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 poly market 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 markets gonna 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 blackmail What do you think happens with prediction mark? Do you think they're just gonna continue to happen or is there gonna be some legislation that comes in and fucks it? I think it's gonna have to be legislation. I can't imagine that this just runs 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 But it's now the volume is literally I think like 98% sports betting So it's like even on poly market on on both cows you probably which is why no big city swing Especially now like football season. It's like insane. I gave there's one guy who was a very prolific sports better back in the day and 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 II types of ways very smart people, but they're they're always playing this cat-and-mouse game You know, so with the when he was sports betting It's like you get an edge and then the casino realizes what's going to 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 like all in on poly market So I gave this guy a million dollars and he said 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 like amazing like payout if these 15 different things happen and the odds of those 15th, you know Whatever like the Cowboys will score the first touchdown and the national anthem goes this long and it's like a new It's an actor in the you parlay. Yeah As you go the more you go the better the past so 10 could be 2 grand and the guys happy and he's gonna enjoy Watching the game more but the real odds of that happening are like 2 million to 1 and you're paying 2,000 so you can just be the market so like all these quant firms like Jane Street and whatever like Not Jason like more like Jump Street like smaller 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. Mm-hmm, you know, I think is like an Underappreciated thing about the like takeoff of prediction markets is like how legible they made betting like split it into two percent And they're just like, when we were growing up, you look at life to one. Oh, what's 13 to two that this horse is going to win this game is going to have a goal in this minute is going to 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 shit house village has on the America is like, yeah, we're like Mormons married and we're like, wow. We can have sex. It's like giving alcohol to the native American. It is. Yeah. Yeah. Totally evolutionarily novel. Stimulus. I do. I do think there's a place for, um, a hedge fund that just uses poly market and calcium and just shorts America in international sports. Because like, do you remember in the world cup when, uh, 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 court touring goals. 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 would like 63%. Yeah. It's like, so you're saying you need to bet against like a 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 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 by about that. But if a Brit says 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, um, the NFL controversy, the hypocrisy that just happened? Uh, like the cat, like the Dallas Cowboys player, he scores a touchdown and his celebration was, he took the football and he like, like kind of made it look like he's shotgunning a beer. So they clamped down and they find them, you know, whatever, $30,000 or whatever it is for the celebration, for the celebration. And, uh, people on Twitter are like, I 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 children in the audience. And then literally as the guy was giving 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 a, 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 sort of what America is. And it's like, Oh yeah. Like maybe I should get a tattoo. I thought I should get, I should get an eyebrow piercing. Right. An eyebrow piercing would be cool. Like we should make a guy from reality TV. The president, wouldn't that be sick? Right. This is American pie. Like it's American, American pie is, um, to go back to Jack's point around the numbers, um, just changing it, the impact it has, but also just, uh, the, you know, the Russell conjugation idea of, um, 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 too. And it feels that winning the poo meme, which was the winning the poo me. No worries. Like with the monocle in the bottom. I have a paper round. I do media distribution. Betting, uh, betting exchange prediction. Yeah, exactly. Oh, you've gone from like basement sofa masturbator to quant refined. It's the male Aoli rebrand, but like, you know, I can't believe that they pulled this off the sports betting to prediction. What have you got? Gee, you've been, we haven't been together for two months, basically. I know. So we have this idea of a 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 parallel in a thing that if you neglect it, everything else is irrelevant. What is a power law? Yeah. So like, for example, I'll give you my realization was, um, 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 Matthew Walker revolution. Yeah, the, and the, I think the peak of it was when, um, Matthew Walker did like the eight part series on sleep with Huberman. And I joked that my friend, uh, Quinny, who's like never overthinks anything after four beers, um, just saying, just shut your eyes, lad will sleep better than anybody who listens to that podcast and the power law. And I think Matthew and a human probably actually agree that the power law I took was all the other stuff like, um, temperature control, um, wind down routines is ultimately the first thing is the more you try to sleep, the worse you will sleep and therefore anything else that stacks 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 midwif mean, 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 insomnia, which is like trying to end up like improve your margin by 10%. And you've gone bankrupt that 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. 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 meaning 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 just 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 twice a year and everything lives inside of a simple dashboard, so you track trends over time, make sure you're moving in the right direction, and this level of testing would usually cost thousands, but with Function, it is $365 per year, just $1 a day to actually know what's happening inside of your body. And right now you can get $25 off, bring it down to 340 bucks. Get the exact same blood panels that I use and save $25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. Me and you have been through the ringer when it comes to sleep. An equivalent that I, the first one that comes to mind for me is 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? Uh, so I trained with Sam Sulak. Do you know who that guy is? I 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 far 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, the, one of the ones that I would think is you can optimize your intra workout protein window with predigested way and the right amount maltodextrin to shut all 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 cold, 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 basis than maybe any other one thing. Right. So that would be something that I think is kind of similar. Jack, have you heard his, uh, his blue light glasses sleep story where you're with, please take it from the top, take it from the top incredible story. Have you heard this or not? 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 stacking more, I'm going to 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 your girl. And, uh, doing this, 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, 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 seething and I go, Oh, like midwit meme. My, my, my answer was going to be basically the same as Chris's, but in a different world is like the planning 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 of people are going to respond to how they 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, but in the last few weeks, I love citing myself. This is, well, this is many years of pain condensed into one sentence. It's like, if you want real feedback at a buy button. Oh, so great. What's that line? That was actually a pretty good tweet. All right. Thank you very much. Second only to, uh, moving from theory to practice will always cost you status. It's another one of yours. I like that one too. The, uh, 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 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 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 talk about this, this, and this. And it's like, just 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 market. Doesn't lie. 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 look great. You know? And I'm like, yeah, not so bad myself. Did a little progress and people were like, oh, so like, what do you do? And now it's basically like, it's like a scene from Silicon Valley. It's like this, the stupidest trope we fell into where, uh, you know, he's talking about how he bought a DEXA machine, like he bought his own DEXA scanner for like whatever, six grand or 16 grand or whatever it is. I'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 talked for like 42 minutes. No, like, well, just 45 minutes, last three minutes. Uh, I look over and this is 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 getting pretty good shape. And 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. 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. Like 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. Mark, have you got that diagram? So I don't know whether you made this, but that idea that you're talking about, I did, I came across this this morning. Is it, did you make this? Yeah. Can you take us through that? 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. You're 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 like a 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, you know, humiliating enough. Now we're playing Simon says was 5,000 people in an auditorium, but you know, I'm at the events, let's play along. So you say, yeah, 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. 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, 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 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, we didn't care. We didn't think we 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 he, 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 a, you know, a 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, uh, 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, like 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, 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 move quick enough to do it first too. It might've felt that way. I bet there's other people 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, 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. Podcasting is so competitive, right? Like it's, 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're in a high school. It's like the beginning of a J from the in-betweeners. He was the only person who sent in. Uh, so every, every can of Sprite for six months or however long they run a campaign in the UK. And he's like, I can't believe I won. And whoever the like marketing director was like, yeah, you're the only person. My buddy Dan in college did this. He would always, he won like six or seven things. Uh, you know, the sandwich shop spicy pickle. They have a mascot. Guess who won the mascot naming contest? Dan wanted, he named him spy C pickle. It's a spy themed pickle. He wins a lifetime supply of spicy pickle. He won a lifetime supply of stride gum. He was like, Hey, let's go audition for prices right, right now. And then we went, 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. 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 it. 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 alternative 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 than you, and it's that teal idea of, um, you're not a lottery ticket, 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. Around. I think you misattributed a great quote to me once about podcasts, like how many podcasts you need to do to be in the top 1%. 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 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. Yeah. Chris Williamson quote, Jack butcher quote Reddit. Yeah. It's the fucking, a lot of people to, to stop. Well, this is my most centipede, but the guy at the front is no one knows who he is. Well, it's like that, um, that quote around, uh, uh, Albert Einstein, um, what compound interest is the, what the seventh, eighth one of the world. Sorry. And, uh, it's been pointed out. Seventh is Niagara falls or something. Yeah. Then pointed out that Einstein didn't actually say that, uh, 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. Churchillian drift is great. 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 Puri that one said. One day. Accumulating free alpha everywhere. Talk about arbitrage. That's the freest arbitrage that you can think of. A quick aside. If you've wanted an eight sleep, but can 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 six. 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 six now starts at just $1,999. The lowest starting price eight sleep has ever offered. Best of all, for the first time, eight sleep 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 it and sleep on it for 29 nights. And if you don't like it, they'll just give you your money back. Plus they ship internationally. So don't be scared by the currency amount right now. You can get up to $350 off the pod six by going to the link in the description below or heading to eight sleep.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. A checkout. Have you guys done any non-shopping lately? Have you done any, any never arrived shopping? I heard about dopamine websites. Yeah. These are crazy. Have you seen this? Okay. We've all seen it. Maybe I should have seen it. I've heard about it, but I wouldn't actually used it. Uh, it's surprisingly a little less, I think there's room for improvement in this, but 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. They've already got a birth rate. So low that sex is pointless. Well, like this. 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, 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. Christ is 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 of shopping without ever having to pay a cent. The makers of food never comes have now released, um, like the, like, uh, travel never comes or something like that. It's basically like you can shop for a holiday that you know, you plan a vacation, uh, that never, that doesn't cost you a cent because you're not going to go on it. And this is actually apparently quite popular. There it is. Our trip never leaves. 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 and I'm made 5 million today and then I'm getting offers from my private equity. Yeah, there was, there was a, there was an app where I'm streaming one. Seen that where you can like, it's a simulates a live stream. You go live, but you're like speed where your chat is going nuts. The hearts are flying guys. If you like to pull chicks in clubs, exactly. Yeah. That's fucking crazy. There's another one. I think it was a South Korea as well, where you could go for a smoke break, an imaginary smoke break with coworkers, but you didn't smoke and you didn't have coworkers. So what did you do? Like what it was to do it. It was fake smoke breaking. Like you just went out to whatever the local, like the, uh, gang way 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 that people have built with the new tools that make it easy for anybody to make a video game. Well, 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 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? 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 hours and like the input output was so low bandwidth compared to like a fortnight or something that you like in comparison, that's like meditation. Now we were having this conversation about the transcendental runescape. I mean, fire it up man, fire it up. We were talking about, um, the exposition, the increased exposition that's needed in, uh, TV shows. Now, what was the word that was used? It's not exposition, piloting, piloting. It's called piloting. 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 becomes like 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 outside of its realm, but it'd 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. So pop up, pop up, pop up, pop up, pop up. 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, it'll be around forever. It's been, well, when was the first fast and furious? 20 years ago, 15 years ago had to be 20. Yeah. And 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 fast and furious. So he'll be like, he's just sitting in his complete, his character's amazing. He's so deadpan. He'll be like top five, uh, key tosses in fast and furious. Vin classic left-hand toss. No, look, catch them before we have this, but he's doing it on every minor thing that could happen. Didn't you want about like best beer chinks or something? Corona swings and he's exploded. Let's get him up. I binged his stuff. I was like, this is honestly like, you got to get niche with that. That's incredible. Anyone that loves anything that much, or is that good at anything? There's these dudes called crown cinema. 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 that's kind of a bit silly, but the most incredible breakdowns of, uh, like shutter Island or inception and like the best explanation of a million things that you didn't notice, even as someone's like, yeah, I got 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 was, 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 that's so great. But this is your theory that, uh, 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 and the middle, all of the stuff in the middle is 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 and 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 and you like somebody's take on it. It feels like where things 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 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 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 put them all in. Okay. All right. What a recovery they've made over all those injuries. They've kept fighting. Can they fight on from here? Board of the packets. Hunter kicks inside the first. Oh, they're like legit good. Yeah. Moses Jones. The guy in the background is the best. He's like. Kicks it back towards the green. In front Franklin. Knocked away by Morris. Nae Smith sold a team. Making it trouble. Quick pinging by Kennedy. And Franklin was run down. Tomboy's got it. Tomboy goes long. How will it bounce? The stadium haunts its freedom. It's a goal. And the Western suburbs collapse. Everybody pinned once, but go down. They're voiceovering it. So it's not them doing it themselves. So they're like remembering, this is Australian football for some reason. Ah, it's like nostalgia association. Try and find like a world cup one or something. That looks pretty good. It's not even. their own language there's so much work they put in the old one-eyed 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 another it's so good um but this i gotta 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 jordan and everyone in basketball and so if you watch this thing story's crazy this guy and doesn't play scrabble till 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 are 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 with 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 drove like rode home unbelievable and the clips i'm watching clips and they're like all right he gets these letters and they're like chd 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 he'll go chlorodyne and they're like don't and they're like lose their mind i want i want the guys that did the commentary to go over the top with the scrabble i 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 they'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 have you seen the thing around the two types of chicken you see this yes yes there's basically every single chicken on the planet is one of two yeah so again i've been eating chicken my entire life i've never thought that deeply about it but it's but i just literally pulled it up then you sleep for you yeah um in uh basically there's dozens of breeders of different types of chicken and it's shrunken all the way down to cob vantras owned by tyson and averaging owned by german's eu group their flagship products the cob 500 and the ross 308 and we basically got rid of all of the different variations of chicken so i assume it's like genetically there's only two chickens it's almost like there's only poodle and rottweiler we've kind of slowly because these chickens however 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 500 yeah i'm a massive fan of the 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 kind of biodiversity of earth as an alien you just see the number of chicken skulls because we're getting through millions of the i'm sorry trillions of these cob 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 gym shark 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 high fives the hybrid shorts are my go-to they are the perfect length super lightweight easy to wash and dry and their sleeveless t-shirts what i've trained in every day for basically the last decade they're the ideal fit they're breathable they hold their shape perfectly no more looking like adam sandler's your stylist basically everything they make is unbelievably well designed you already know about them they're high quality you get 30 days of free returns globally with global shipping and a 10 discount site wide so get that 10 discount by going to the link in the description below or heading to gym.sh slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom 10 a checkout that's gym.sh slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom 10 a checkout where i thought this i was walking to 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 like what i see get ingested by where are all the vultures then that are eating them right like okay foxes okay but foxes eating the skulls of squirrels yeah where's all the squirrel skulls 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 a knife and fork they 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 service 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 i don't see what i love though and you can do this raccoon there will be there'll 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 and 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 well my particular strand of art that happens on the internet primarily i think some of the some of the stuff that's underappreciated that about that is like the mechanisms underneath the images so like this is not going to be interesting to anyone listening probably that has no like inherent interest in this but the um the idea that so much of art history is actually about like what happened around the art versus the art itself like why is the mona lisa 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 and it depicts this like piece of western culture that everybody refers to as like you know in an inception moment or is it because the printing infrastructure at the time the 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 scale because 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 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 you 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're like attributed you know his the vict what was it like the the winner writes this story or the history history is written by way 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 put 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's coming and be like uh yeah no he's he's pretty interested and he said he's going to go back and just get the money together and it's like i have to have it now you know it's like the memetic games we did that able to build we did that in nightclubs if we had the two biggest tables if you go into a nightclub there will be one table typically which is only available it's usually behind the dj 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 year'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 of that and it's like get the fucking nun one yeah and then they're like yo they just they just dogged us on that thing like get the fight like and you jump up up up up up up right but 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 stuff and you're like they've had a tenth 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 like 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 and they're consuming just this tiny tiny amount of it memetic tax yeah it is it is it is it's it's small man tax damn this is that's kind of the story of gray goose you guys know this backstory of gray goose uh the the guy who started gray goose is such a legend he um he first uh popularized uh jaeger meister 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 will 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 going to 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're like sipping it he's what is this and they were like oh jaeger meister 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 jaeger and so he he goes and starts reading about it and he's like okay uh no good news is uh bad news is this tastes bad and nobody really cares about an after dinner sipping you know liquor he's like but the good news is the rights are available because nobody wants this afternoon thing so he gets the rights to it he realizes like i have to create the story around this so he's like he gives it to some people to taste it 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 it's kind of like an aphrodisiac they come back and he's like sure is so he starts he starts promoting it that way so he goes to bars he's like oh it's for young people so he goes to like college towns and then he's like it's 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 medicine 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 70s he's like you know what i'm gonna do co-found a new startup and he decides i'm gonna go for vodka and his process to create great goose was go find me the highest price bottle of vodka what is it they're like oh 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 uh height we need to be taller than that so the only place you can put it is 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 gonna get the vodka go to france and get the vodka they're like vodka's 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 great goose was those three elements working backwards and creating it uh it's really wild this guy lived a wild life this guy sydney 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 90s 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 That's kind of that where does it like how deep does it go? It's like well, hmm 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 On this like topic. I've been thinking more about of there's two if the two words of 2026 I think and they're almost is 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 this I get to say how high status I am by going The thing that's really important in 2026 is taste and 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'll throw it around willy-nilly you can band it around the office willy-nilly And nobody knows exactly what it is And there's a great essay George Orwell's politics in 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 at all and I'm fascinated by because Jack you're somebody who I'd say has like what people would describe His 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, but it's like it's always very simple Billy Oppenheimer And he has this thing called 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 just fascinated by 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 They got I think it's a gap. It's like a one-paragraph definition I'm like having taste means you will always be dissatisfied with what you produce Hmm. 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 That's potential but it's not but your taste the thing that got you into the game is still killer and 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. It's gonna 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 Parrish. You said um, like 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 Mmm, like if you don't ever but it's your thing about I'd rather be high conviction and wrong than low conviction and right I'd rather be um, I'd rather be an idiot and 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 okay. 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 you're 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 Slop 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 guide 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 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 So it's on your list. You said you have a list now of like things. I don't know why I dislike what I dislike Hold on one second. It's interesting around the This is seen as low effort because that John Mark guy Mm-hmm 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 completely mystified by this guy like there's so much aura Until you found out it was AI. It's 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 up front right 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 because I send you the gossip goblin thing the love island Now go on can you find gossip goblin on on What is it this is like AI film and it's like You're not gonna mistake it for not being a I film but the level of craft is absolutely unbelievable Right, and so that 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 like What kind of birds you into love you like more sexy and stuff? Um, I well all types Yeah, I love all birds girls But um, yeah, if I had to pick I'd say I like the pretty ones when these local sexy and stuff Are you calling me fit you're so sweet potsy you nasty slag, how could you go both my man? Welcome to lovers Lagoon. I know where Nero cradles finest flirtiest and feistiest singles fight fornicate and find love So come on, take your hand out of your pants and let's go meet the cast Been a rough year not gonna lie me hairline wobbled my cause. I've got nothing and the gooning got bad real bad But I've locked in now and I'm ready to stop jester Maxine and start mugging, bro. I'm a proper gent I treat every bird like a princess and her father like an absolute king man has cost nothing sweet I mean, it's even God. I wouldn't say I'm full of myself, but I'm the fittest sort here, aren't I? It's just maths in it Don't know really Nice villa though. Yeah, I'm a romantic When a fella Opens a door boom me fanny flutters and I'm already planning our baby's names. Yeah, what's crazy? This is such a strong like Except for him I was about to say the ability to distill Stereotypes like British Sarah each of those is an archetype that exists but yeah, I mean I Don't know a 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 gonna give you I think there's so much ache around AI generally that you're never really gonna know But I think that's short-term. Yeah, I just I agree I think there will be always not 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, 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 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 Evals are also complicated. Nobody knows what the hell No idea what it should just be an IQ right they need to come up with an Number that's like we got 99. They have 98 supreme intelligence. You see the pole Trump. Oh, yeah the rebrand. Oh, yeah, he's trying. He's trying but he's ahead of the game. I want. Oh, yeah He was trying to name it something else supreme intelligence cream was one and then the other one was I but the problem is that ASI means artificial superintelligence, which is the thing that everyone's worried about. Yeah, it wasn't super It was it was supreme and then it was like superiors. I forget but there's like he was the artificial I think the big thing is the artificial. Yeah, which makes sense. It's not the best brand. I mean, he knows his branding. Yeah Yeah, interesting. What was your list? But I think he's not working carry on without me machine intelligence was another one that I've like right again That has the like we're getting replaced. What's this? Here's a Set a gram New pickle, what do you think? Oh Very nice. Look at that. Pick 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 Half sour with garlic brine What do you think Nice Jesus That is really super how to knit with like you get so tasteful I Can't believe that Bryce prefers Van Patten's pickle to mine, but wait You ain't seen nothing yet Barrel cured whole peppercorn Extra crisp impressive very nice. Mm-hmm Let's see Paul Allen's pickle I Want to know how they put the pickles away Look at that subtle olive coloring a 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 it is so close to being over I had speaking of tasteful Alex Wang in Crocs Did you see this? I didn't I did look at the breakdown and the breakdown of the breakdown this one Yeah, yeah So met his chief AI officer Alexander Wang stole the show at MediConnect 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 Metta invested 60 billion dollars into the metaverse almost run out of business then so kind the camo Crocs intern and suddenly everything's fixed He's just replied said Gen Z riser He has a fact-checker. He's on a heater right now. Yeah 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 Because you know at the end of an escalator where this sort of like the teeth of the the combs come together sometimes people's feet get stuck and if you've got this in sport mode and you're this starts getting eaten like people have Just ripped your own foot apart from this but that's why sport mode is only to be used in extreme circumstances That's my piece of advice Wow from a avid croc wearer Gotta 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 your ass for you It probably would and it adjusts automatically every week based on how you're actually progressing for me Following a proper evidence-based plan has made a massive difference And if you're serious about training, it'll do the same for you, too Right now you can get up to $50 off the RP hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below I heading to RP strength comm slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom a checkout That's RP strength comm slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout little micro essay I was going to send you boys about The convergent or everything is either Porn or a casino. Let me try This is your idea that the UK is peak vape shop energy. Yeah, there's a 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 a high street and I'll show you country. This is it the the Twitter handle is KTR IVS and the article to article is called everything is Guna casino It's ahead the ability to write good headlines since sub stack and Twitter articles have come around. Here we go. Everything is good. Yeah 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 Guna content On the timeline Jason at Sydney Sweeney launches an only fans competitor and 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 Guna slop or building a casino. And if you're feeling ambitious and want real PMF, what's PMF? You have some you have some combination of both at 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 was still a thing You couldn't find one without hot women The formula is quite simple find a product find 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 tik-tok 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 into it's pretty long But if you go down, there's a there's a two by two matrix that I think will illustrate will illustrate But it's obviously based off the on the back of the Sydney Sweeney stuff, but I've seen this Okay, so it's a matrix pornography to not pornography And then maybe the next couple paragraphs will sum it up but I love our grinders off the charts But this is a great meme too, yeah On one side, it's Polly market and on the other side. It's only fans 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? I mean, it's there's a very fine line between like the frictionless Commerce component and they're just like pure speculation. Well, you could always just get away with it and be like it's a commentary Yeah, I think that was interesting about like crypto art specifically and its relationship to like the Quote-unquote real art world is like money attention like the manufacturing of attention around work in the traditional art world is the same thing is happening just that like a slower pace 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 somewhat 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 yeah familiar like if you think about like a portrait in a traditional sense like Like the Da Vinci Salvador Mundi 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 $100,000 one of them and 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 Mundi came back to market with itself for a billion dollars, maybe But these things are eight years old already yeah, so I like I have a Yeah, I'm 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 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 and it's it's You get what you expect. Hmm You know one of the two things I wanted to ask you guys kind of related to that article just then is to you've got four kids three kids and there's this whole very much pessimism right now around devices and Casinos or porn and an 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 But it's this kind of media narrative be what age to be like a kid. Yeah, I think so Yeah, I think to be like a college-aged kid right now would be very hard But I think like degree 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? Graphic communication it was cool. Okay, that's pretty spot-on Yeah, what did you do philosophy philosophy? Would to business degrees? Okay. All right, maybe you guys all used your degrees 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 Out to be what they did with the rest of their life because you know You're told to pick when you're 17 8 in the US you major your freshman year of college So you're 17 or 18 years old and you pick a track? Hey, what I don't know was only recently a child decide the rest of the direction of life going to go in This is the arranged marriage of like 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 I want to study literature like the you know go into 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 this like a breakup is a breakup the end or the beginning You could argue either way one of them is gonna serve you if you see this as the beginning the beginning of the next Chapter where I really understand what I want I'm gonna find the right person and I'm gonna be better because of all this or is at the end which is what most People default to and so it's like if you I think it's kind of what you're talking about earlier of you know What's a thing that if you if you got that wrong kind of doesn't matter what else you do? It's a record is if you're at it is the worst time ever to be alive or to be a kid or to be a College graduates like good luck with the rest of that paragraph because you're for opening sentence screw you, you know so it's like you really have no choice but to just say It's the best time ever to 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, 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 Jet engine design 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 Even say that you're only as good as your weakest link But so you just think that applies to everything'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 it for a musician It doesn't really matter how many bad songs you make the only bad thing matters. Did you make one banger song, right? Any strong links in your thread and so strong links apply to all these other things science is actually very interesting he's like the scientific community is like so uptight about publishing papers and they're like replication all this that they've focused so much on weak links meaning the the smartest people believe what you should do is Try to disqualify as much Bad I 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 And it's like oh, yeah, it'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 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 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 How can I 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 fill 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's gone wrong, you know, 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 of time? Nothing has improved in our training ability. No, we got Computers we got zero learning the map around Small and it cost more Yeah It's like obviously the incentive is keep you there charge you as much as you can Like versus the opposite whereas alpha school is like, all right If the students were only on the like learning two hours a day What could you teach how well could you teach them two hours and it turns out like 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 my progress So it's crazy. How are you if you go down an age to like younger ages? How are you two thinking about devices and education for kids? We have zero devices. Oh, yeah. No TV. No device at this age. Would you like to meet my nanny my pacifier my 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 I think that's like part of it as 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 developing and just consuming like consuming consuming consuming because there's no chance They have they stand no chance. So like to me. Oh my that's cigarettes I'm not gonna give my kid total cigarettes, but I have Myself plus met so many people that played a lot of video games growing up and 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 a great 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 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 into 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 it just I Think everybody is concerned about what it does 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 the uni for quite a while 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 distract ability 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 Which 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 your students that are using AI retains so much less information, etc, etc I know that this is this will be triggering all of your techno optimist No, no. No, I was gonna I was gonna build on your argument for a second. Really? Yeah, I was gonna build on it. So, um You remember the old-school? In brain imaging of black cabs in London people that learn to black cab drive and they have to remember it for about three years It's real changes in the brain truly changes the location of brain, but what's fascinating? I've always what I would like to fund this is follow-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 cab drivers. We're in 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 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 flop I don't know why the risk of failure maybe but friction is Pretty much. What's the difference between friction and risk of failure? What 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 but 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 that like doing the rep? Yes, whether it was like if you reread if you reread a page Yeah, 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 over and over again? Yes. So maybe the failure thing plays into that. 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. Yeah, failure is friction. This might be a stupid distinction, but like the cost of failure, like not knowing where you're going as a tax driver is like bankruptcy, you know? 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. Vast majority of people are just going to go that route. I had a, I did this film like earlier this year with 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 coming out 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, don't write the best prompt, but they're just going to, they're going to prompt for the prompt. Just grade the prompt. There's no, there's no end to it. But they'll still prompt for the prompt. But then I said, okay, grade it with the LLM then. You put the, you make the student the grader. So you give the student five LLM outputs and they have to tell you which one is the best and why. And then that forces them to at least have to have to think, do you guys think there's going to be like brain gyms? Like, you know, um, there weren't gyms when we all worked and did manual labor. The idea of like coming home from the field and be 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 mines 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 going to happen? Like, are we going to brain gyms where artificial cognitive friction? Yeah. Like you go do Sudoku 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? That's a great, that's a great point, but there isn't as much, uh, bottle service upside to the brain gym. It's true. And also you can't see my, 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, I graded, I graded the karate kid of Sudoku. The advantage of going to the gym is that you get a pump, which 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 do a lingo or whatever. You're not. Briefly six months progressed. 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. Bro, 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 myself. 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 or they want to, they try to, they say they do. Well, you could have it. If you could actually, um, my MRI or scan your brain, as soon as that becomes more of it, that could become the flex. I'm like, geez, have you seen tracks? And it might be, it might be like the, you know, the, the January gym signups with the brain gym. It might be just purely, you know, the direct debit coming out makes you feel good about wanting to increase the increase on your front lobe. Exactly. There was a, did you ever use that muse headband back in the day? Me, Johnny and Yusef were on it. Do you, have you seen this? So it was, uh, uh, E E G E K G E K G brain, uh, thing. So it kind of like a headband. Yeah. Yeah. This is it. Uh, forge the skill of attention, measure, track, and improve your most valuable asset used by NASA, Harvard, and over a thousand plus research. So I've trained on a billion minutes of, of, of data. 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 that thing, that was what we used to use, which was for, um, uh, meditation. And, uh, you would put this on and it would have a 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, um, yeah, it was your quote, all the gear and no idea. It's easy to not be distracted when anybody attractive will leave the room. I, unless you have a colored version, I don't think there's a, 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 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, attractive because it was a signal of wealth. And then like that changed as we got abundant and then, you know, 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. You must have a chat GPT pro membership. He's he's so post money. A little quick, quick, quick, quick question. Question. Um, what's an idea you've changed your mind upon in the last 12, 24, six, three months, just a, something you've, you used to hold quite 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. Okay. All right. Thank you. You got to give us a little, just a little time process. We've got the more sophisticated, what you're about to say sounds as a definitely sounds, but not necessarily is correct, but it's all about appearances, Christopher, but I benefit from low expectations. Um, what the fuck have I changed my mind on? I think it has had it. All right. Oh yeah. Yeah. That's a big one. I'm not a good guy to ask. Don't have to be somewhat big. It could be somewhat small. Uh, something that there is relatively, it's just a bit surprising from like a cultural perspective is I, I think that there is increasing like cool alpha available in being a moderate Democrat, like a moderate left-leaning person at the moment. I think that the swing that you see, yeah, maybe people don't like the 5am call to prayer in New York from Mamdani and like, maybe his optics are a bit bad and maybe he's like a faux socialist and 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 blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But 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. So, 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 culturally more accepting, 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, uh, Jacob and Jake from screenwriter, 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 the Trevor's been like, he's a fucking superstar, obviously. But, uh, that, that was like a, not me changing my mind, but something that I've noticed as a cultural switch. Or I'm like 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, then 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 plan against the fundamental principles that lots of people wanted him for and why people want to get them in. And it's like all of this crossover and like people that were never. Like never woke us being like anti Trump now, or at least like Trump skeptical, Trump adjacent, the 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 two thousands 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 rationalist movement, long-term ism. Like, you know, scientism comes through Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and stuff. And then quite quickly that pivots, like maybe quite a lot of baby got thrown out with that bathwater. I'm not so sure that that was a great idea. And Latin mass is now the most ascendant 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 they, 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. And 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, but 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, go on. It's kind of like this. So when I changed my mind on about a very, like you were talking about religion, I'm not a very religious person. I posted a tweet the other day. And I just said, do you believe in God? Yes or no. And, um, what do you think my like Twitter audience answered that percentage said? Yes, I'd say, uh, 35%, 40, 30, 40. I was going to go 60. I really, yeah. You're closest. It was like 75% said, yes, I was pretty stunned by the 74. Yeah. 74% said yes. Um, and 3,000 votes, 3,000 votes, which is like my audience is. I would have guessed leaned a different way. Um, 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, um, of 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. So people go study, like, what'd you see, what happened? And, um, one of the interesting things that he says is. Commonly it's like alien spottings where different people say the same thing. They, you all say it flew this way. Like that's how did you guys all coordinate that answer? Um, 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, oh, you know, my life flashed before my eyes, they think you're watching some replay of your life or highlight reel of your life. All the key moments of your life. And actually what these people say is, uh, the opposite that basically. Um, 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, these amazing encounters with you and you 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 people. 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 shot version of karma where you had to. Blitz through an experience that, and it would feel like hell. And so like, I, I haven't looked into it. I haven't gone red. He mentioned a couple of books and whatnot. I'm going to go read, but it was the first time that 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 I've experienced things like deja vu that I can't explain. I'm like, I've, I've viscerally felt this. I 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 you guys are 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, this, uh, 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 centered version of like. Who am I? What was my life? How is this going? What 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 friend Ramon, you know Ramon Ramon is like just this absolutely like gem of a guy. He's just a single father He's like the best friend to any of us like just shows up for everybody almost to a literal extent my buddy had a baby and he Heard that they were going to labor and like just bought it before you could even think just bought a plane ticket came down showed Up at the hospital and was just like with gifts and like had you know that when they were like, hey We're like still, you know, she's gonna make it like yeah, he goes to their house and just like decorate He's just like a little friend He's 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 realizing if I don't do this Nobody's really 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's this idea of Greatness is not accomplishing something great It'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 flip books where any one page looks like nothing But the whole thing when you see you're like, wow, that was incredible. I think his life would look like that Wow if I had to guess He has a quite high theory of mine So he could probably think how Sean thinks or is that kind of theory of mine? It seems to come online around about four or five so I'm sure you guys have experienced this when you're watching the TV says 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 world view and there's something about four or five that it comes online but what's interesting I look at theory of mine kind of like writing because writing comes online about four or five and Most Forty-two-year-olds have a higher theory of mine than a five-year-old, but also William Shakespeare wrote Macbeth of 42 So that there's like it's can still keep on like compounding and I think like a lot of people with theory like most Forty-two-year-olds will have a better theory of mine than a five-year-old But they kind of might think and it's so easy to fall into that barista is this kind of automaton Right that's getting in the way of my life. He's messed up the coffee Oh, no, this person was up till 3 a.m. Last night, right? They're ready to do and trying to see the world. Not only is not only you a little bit more empathetic It's actually a more accurate world view you kind of move to like 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 all grateful blah blah blah shit, but it's actually the accurate model of physics, right? Therefore you're more likely to make more accurate predictions as well. Yeah, I just on that One life hack that I've never actually thought about properly, but as I've just started 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 them now not in a very gratuitous way But there was one time that I I know you've got a story from Dubai when you left to buy which it kind of inspired This 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 a.m 10 30 a.m and this was the 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 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 you know, really really lovely guy that just as a life hack 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 a hundred percent tip on 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 So, um, hold on 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 boys trip And so for the boys trip each guy kind of contributed one segment of the trip So it's like I was like, oh we're gonna go do this one guys Like we're gonna go to a Muay Thai gym and and spar each other We're gonna go to this to Barton Springs and go swim whatever and so one of the things he did extra He was like, he brought a thousand dollars of cash and he's like, you know This is the thing that I do with my son and he's like, you know, maybe once every couple 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 and so he's like We spend the rest of the day. We start in the morning He's like we 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 in 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 because I want my son to learn that But I was a son yesterday where he's like, you know, he hands us the money and I'm like it was this is the hardest part It was harder than sparring was figuring out how to do this was like a lot of pressure Do I give this how do I get 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 the other person feel weird How do I get over my own? Hesitate it's like this is literally his money. He's hands me. It's for this purpose, but I'm like, you know, not that Something better than that. They're not gonna use it. Well, it's like how's 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 given some of the money way whatever but she was like She's 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 and give without hesitation but you're you're right like 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 a such a simple one Anyone can access. Can you tell 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 But when I was in 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 I'd walked 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 and we never spoke to another but every day I've walked to the gym I'd see him I give him a wave and he give me like that or he give me a different salute I just got this guy. I'd always not have a bad zoom call or something could go wrong Let's see. This guy goes is great. We did it for months We never spoke but it just do it I mean I need to give that guy a tip before I go and I was on in bed on my final night and I was watching Liam Neeson taken and I my flight was in six hours It's the wrong film to watch when you fight 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 guy the tip. I'm like, am I gonna leave a Flight in six hours. Am I gonna go and leave to go and give this guy the tip my yes I am so I get an uber pull it up. I don't know if he's gonna be on the shift It's like 11 p.m. It's but I get an uber wait for the uber to come gets delayed The uber gets cancelled another uber comes. I'm like right my flights 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 wondering around loads of people at bars and nightclubs I'm like, okay. I'm literally just trying to find this guy. I'm looking I'm looking I'm looking I got I see him I go right and I go to the cash machine and I got out Because the time I didn't have a crazy my money and I said, okay, I'm just gonna give him that so walk over to 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 he's I'm getting a uber back. So he hasn't even really looked at the money He then carries on talking to the person who comes through I'm waiting for this uber and I go I don't even saw I've given him 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 was in hindsight. I should give more right I did. I love that story. I really do love that story Change you mindy anything my stuff This is not gonna 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 The last couple weeks with us like Muse rollout stuff What does everybody need an agent for? 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 new stuff. Is it mean is it that a lot of people are using a Facebook bill? Agent tool that connects to your Instagram or whatever else and like instantly Look 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 Don't die an Asian guy with a mullet dude, that's the lesson But yeah, I mean I've been I was a 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 But man, you know if I tell her to download what to her the like not muse but instincts like the same thing It's like a instincts like the hot like startup version of this and then Facebook's trying to do it 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 I can do anything watch just like Tell it to go ask if you if the state of California owes you any money and then it like comes back to miss later It's like yeah, you actually owed $2,000 would you like me to file the claim and it'll just get a check mailed to you? She's like yes, so, you know, it's like I'm just trying to show up like watch this and actually works. Yeah Yeah, everybody somebody it's auto prompt. You should just that should be the onboarding It's like just ask this question because almost all of us are owed money in some back way What was she owed from it'll be like a tax date refund. It'll be like a franchise board thing It'll be you know, so you have to load files in and can do Log in with gmail and it'll just rip 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 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 hey, what time is the soccer game on Sunday? And where is it? We're gonna 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 gonna tell you and then it's gonna actually recommend like that morning It'll I don't forget to pack the red jerseys because soccer today we're away, you know, it's like shit like that So we did our like it helped my wife plan my daughter's birthday party And then she saw I was trying to like sell her on the utility I'm like, look how useful this is try this try this for this. She's liking it I mean after the birthday party, she goes, okay, I'm blown away. I go what it helped you plan it She goes no look and Instincts had texted her How was the birthday party? I hope it was awesome with 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 a friend who's gave it to Mother-in-law and they connected to like their bank account everything cuz they're like, this is awesome I could do so much and the character Baker that had zero dollars in the like checking account and It just goes it's okay. I'm like and it just gave her like a little pep talk It's 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 Was actually like a no judgment Always always there people don't or do people don't do hard things because you don't you have to face somebody that you don't know to Facing the things that you're ashamed of or Like bills. I didn't do this form, right? It also goes to show just how low the bar is for being a good friend Mmm, that's true, right that 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 So 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 also I guess kind of great Do you know Shane Mack? Yeah. Yeah, he started a company years ago He started a company years ago based on 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 It's the best response to anything I ever Ever did for my employees and then he ended up founding a company off that which was military spouses as Assistants, so it's still going as deployed wife is here want something to do from home part-time Military wife assistance. Yes. It's a great presumably as well. I squared away Fucking operator like a serious operator like you're not gonna be in a relationship with a guy that flies fighter jets, right? I'm not be like competent. Oh, 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 you? What have you changed your mind on? Um, oh, one of them, um, is, uh, 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 sell it, shape rotators and themselves. And, uh, 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. Um, 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, I, again, product market fits one of those words where it's a little bit like taste. It's a little bit like, what is that? Um, and they'll be like, well, your NPS score, if your NPS score says that 40% of people like hate the product, 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 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. And he goes, I fucking hate you. He goes, if he 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 in my whole life, but come Friday, I'd be back on drink element.com ordering the watermelon salt because the product's not good. And that's my realization that product might 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 the Sean. There was a moment in time that everyone's forgotten about now where Apple released this new iOS change that was 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 example of abuses of power. How could Apple be allowed to do this in the U S 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 as like that's product market plan. It's so good that I'll buy it in spite of Amazon box phenomena. You know that it's like complain about Amazon's business practices, but have like 10 boxes show up at your house every day. Actually, Buffett use this. So Buffett made the biggest gains of Buffett's life was, uh, 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 call in the, 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 would 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 you famously didn't invest in Microsoft, even though he told you to and others that he, and you've said like, I just didn't understand it. He goes, oh yeah. Cause 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 to like collateralize. And he stood in a store and watch people swiping and he had talked to the cashier. He's like, do you like distrust if somebody is going to use American express now? And they're like American express that's, that's like, of course I like, I trust American express with my, it's always going to go through. So he realized people were mispricing it. Same thing with Apple. Like, um, if you have somebody with an iPhone, um, there isn't like 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. And so he made all his money just by like talking to people that I, who are iPhone users and realizing the extent of the, uh, the switching cost to them mentally in their head. Forget even how much you might hate the person that's doing it. Kanye West is like the canonical example of that. Like how many ways can you put both feet in your mouth over a decade period and then still sell out stadiums and that 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 going to fuck a Siri has gotten worse. As far as I can see over the last sort of five to 10 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 and the integration is so good. The fact that I can have my notes here on this and I, everything, my passwords or the, and 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 there'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 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 mouth thing that they can do that doesn't cause them to like, 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 like a crazy statement. Dana White's got plot armor in the same way. Like who else can get into a domestic altercation in public with their wife and just then whatever the next day or the day after just own it and be like, wasn't me at my best. And 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 two or three, and you're like, oh my God, this guy's just got a lot of self awareness. She's Alex O'Connor's idea that you can get away with anything on the internet if you're sufficiently self-aware. Um, uh, Brian Johnson can get away with anything on the internet as long as it's sufficiently self-aware. Uh, Mike O'Hearn is the same thing. So do you think Trump is self-aware? Uh, that's different. I think that's conviction. That's conviction and congruence. Right. People are barbell either zero self-awareness. Boys. I love you all. Why should people go to keep up? You've got a new project out. Yeah. Why should people go to check out a Twitter Jack butcher on Twitter, please? Okay. Uh, get off Twitter, social media, go read a book. Good book. I recommend it's think on these things by a Christian Martinez. Good book. Okay. Um, pie agency.com forward slash books. All my favorite books. Boys. I love you. This is fucking awesome. This stuff rules. Uh, and that's it. Let's go. Thank you. Goodbye.