Transcript: The Tragic Decline Of Rationality In Society – George Mack

It’s because if you live in a thirty person part of a hundred and fifty person tribe and I know George, and I know that George is friends with Dean, but Dean used to be friends with George’s ex friend Josh, and now Dean and Josh… and it’s this very complex intersecting web of hierarchies and who’s in and who’s out and by how much and who used to be like this.

So the human brain largely is a Facebook friend tracker, with knobs and dials that you can keep in touch with. And that’s why he said that human brains got so big because computationally, to try and do this… It’s like one squared versus two squared versus three squared versus four squared. The numbers just run away with each other, and that’s kind of how it works. It’s like thirty squared. It’s like thirty people, and each of their interactions with each different person now and in the past and in the future, and what do we think is going to happen?

The Triangle of Thinking, Acting, and Feeling

GEORGE MACK: I think that just the idea of reflexivity as a whole and then when you see it, you can’t unsee it.

I don’t know if you ever done any cognitive behavioral therapy, but there’s this most simple model in there, which when you go, “Ah, okay. This all makes sense now.” And it’s like the reflexivity of the human mind where you have a triangle, which is how you think, how you act, how you feel, and all three of them impact one another.

So how you feel impacts how you think and act. How you act impacts how you think and feel, and how you think impacts how you feel and act.

And then when you begin to see this triangle constantly exist, and I had the biggest midwit meme moment ever whilst I was away. I was in Lake Como. Perfect scenes. And I was driving this little speedboat, and I was like, “I’m James Bond right now. Like, I’m living the dream.” Right? Anyway, I see a video back, and my face is like… I said to the person who filmed the video, I go, “Is this what my face is like all the time?” They go, “Yeah. You never really smile.” Resting bitch face.

Yeah. I had resting bitch face. And I honestly think one of the highest ROI things of just shaping perception is, you told me you have a tattoo of a smile there. It’s a smile. Yeah.

And listening to the Sam Harris podcast you did of checking on the present moment and just rather than focus on the breath, just focus on how your facial expressions are. Right. And just a simple like, it is the highest thing that just moving it to a brief smile. A, your perception completely changes, but B, as a reflective system, rather than people going, “That guy’s really serious.” It’s like, “Oh, that guy’s a bit fun.” Treat him as something else.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I realized that I was socially anxious, especially toward the end of my twenties at the end of my teens and then getting into the start of my twenties. And that’s a reflexive recursive system as well because if you’re nervous around people, people might interpret that as nervousness or as seriousness or whatever, which means that people treat you in a manner which is less warm because you appear less warm, which means that you see the world as an adversary, not as a compatriot, which means that you then are less capable of opening up and there it goes.

GEORGE MACK: Well, that’s the same with the thinking, feeling, and acting thing. Right? So if, for example, you have the thought, “I’m an introvert, and I hate going out.” Therefore, you feel a bit more wanting to stay in a bit down, and then you act like that, and then that cycle completely repeats itself. And it’s so simple, and it’s why cognitive behavioral therapy has such an impact. Right? When you can see that triangle and then go, “Well, which lever am I going to pull?”

Introversion and Social Connections

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: My theory about introversion: Most people aren’t introverts. Their friends just suck.

That even around like, if you get an introvert around the right people, they’re no longer introverted, and it’s a recursive loop as far as I can see. Many of the people that believe that they’re introverts are just in the wrong social group.

GEORGE MACK: One of the questions I was going to ask you about is things you change your mind on. And on this specific point, I have that realization where when COVID happened, a lot of people experienced this where they start going online and they’re meeting so many interesting people. Because the online world, you immediately go to global maximum, like, the best of online.

And then you can immediately think that “I’m going to be online from now on. I’m just going to be doing Zoom calls all the time. I’m going to be in Telegram chats.” And my online friends are so much more interesting, but the realization that it’s just because to get into Global Maximum or the peak of the Internet, you just log on and you’re there, and you find your little tribe. But trying to find that in person is really difficult. But then when you find it, it’s like a hundred times better.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Correct. Yeah. It’s deeper.

One of the interesting things that’s happened with the Internet is it’s allowed people with very niche interest to find other people that got a niche. This is all of Reddit. Right? Reddit is refined not by individuals, but by topics, and it makes it unique in some regards for social media.

That’s been great because people that are into obscure late eighties anime from one particular region of Japan or whatever are able to get together and enjoy whatever it is that they’re into. So good for a selection effect, but bad for depth. Right? And in person, very difficult to find the three other people in your five hundred thousand person city that’s also into this obscure anime. But if you were to find them, the level of depth of connection, which is why I think, using the Internet to explore and then using in person to exploit is the best paradigm. That’s how we met.

GEORGE MACK: Yes. You know, we selected to become friends through the Internet. And then once you do that, you go, “Okay. Let’s twist this into in person.”

What’s super strange about this, though, is all you need is one in person event. Like, if, for example, you never meet and you use the digital layer as the foundation, so you just text chats, video calls, you could stack, like, thousands of them versus if you have one physical experience that acts as the floor that you then stack everything else on top of, it’s so much richer. You only need a few in person meetings to then be able to stack it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s the reason why I put it in my newsletter this week, I think. It was, always say yes to dinner. And if someone’s coming through town and you may be a little bit tired and you just don’t know, whatever, but you’ve been kind of a bit interested in this person in a while. You’ve been chatting to someone on Internet or something. Just say yes to go to dinner.

And the number of times that just saying yes to a meeting, a quick coffee with somebody, a catch up, or whatever it is, the number of friends that you have on the Internet is so vast, and the number of people that you’ve met in the real world is so small that if you can be the sort of person who steps out of Internet friend and into real world friend, which only takes thirty or sixty minutes to traverse that particular gap.

Because if you were to just high five someone in an airport as you’re both rushing for planes, I don’t think that does it. Think there needs to be a little bit of cost. There needs to be a little bit of investment of time put in. And in about sixty minutes – a dinner would be more than enough to be able to get this done.

The Importance of Memes in Society

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But if you can do a trip with somebody, if you can go away with somebody, or if you can go through something a little bit more difficult, like taking mushrooms whilst doing VR, then, yeah, you can get out on the other side.

Memes. Both of us are massive fans of memes. You’re going to meet Mary Harrington a little bit later on today who came up with “meme first explain later.” Before we even get into talking about the most important memes that we want to run through with you, why is it about memes and stickiness of ideas that’s so important? Why do you think that’s so crucial to get right?

GEORGE MACK: So the first point is that “meme” itself, the word, is an ironic word. It’s kind of like dyslexia. Like, no dyslexics can spell dyslexia. And the word meme is itself quite a bad meme because when you say meme to most people, what do they think? They think of dog photo with dog photo on the Internet.

So you need to zoom out a little bit first and go a meme is essentially just a spreadable idea and how the story spreads from people to people. So dog photos is part of that, but you have “okay boomer.” You have “Karen.” “Learn to code.” “Make America great again.” Like, all these things, whether you hate them, love them, whatever, are memes, and they spread.

And you see this where there’s ideas that have existed that haven’t had the right meme, kind of like a product that hasn’t had the right marketing.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Mhmm.

GEORGE MACK: And then you create a meme for it, and, like, charisma’s been around for so long. People have just spoke about it, but it’s always so naive idea of it. Charisma was, like, the most uncharismatic topic to talk about, ironically. Sorry, Charlie Hooper. Sorry.

But all of a sudden, you create the word “Riz,” and everyone wants Riz. And then the language shapes perception, and then people are actually talking more about it. Same with the word “ick.” Like, the fact that you then have this placeholder to then discuss these things.

But I think the fundamental thing with a good meme is to almost look at it like a simple algorithm. And thanks to COVID, like, I’ve known about k factors for ages, right, or r numbers. It’s essentially for let’s say with COVID, different strains, how if I had it or one person had it, how many people they spread it to. So if you go over one, then it’s exponential growth. This is a big thing in the startup and tech space for a while.

So when you’re analyzing a Facebook coming along, how many when Chris joins, if he brings one more person with him on average, then just infinite growth until it disappears. But with a meme, what you need for that k factor is essentially the level of emotion and the friction for it to spread and how simple it is to understand. The more complex it is, the less the meme. Whereas when you shorten it down to “riz” and it’s catchy and it’s three letters, all of a sudden, it can spread.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Can have two z’s. Is it four?

GEORGE MACK: Could be, two or three. Depends if you’re north or south London.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. I was talking to the dude that founded Legendary Foods, the cinnamon roll thing that I gave you while you’re on. And I was saying to him, what do you call the category of products that you’ve got there? We’ve got a craft table filled with protein goods over there. And, I was like, what do you call what you do? And he’s like, we’ve been trying to nomenclature this for ages because the closest thing is protein bar.

Right? But it doesn’t capture what’s there because there’s crisps, and there’s a cinnamon roll, and there’s a Pop Tart, and there’s, like, donuts and stuff. So it’s not a protein bar. Health snack, a protein conscious confectionery treats, like healthy sweet, like what you know? And it’s all about getting the meme right.

GEORGE MACK: Yes. And if you get the meme right, everything downstream from that works.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The episode I did with Eric Weinstein, he made a really nice tweet about the fact that he was talking about making the temporary archival, I think, the ephemeral archival. And he likes the idea of filming things in high quality because he gives it more gravitas and more evergreen sort of Lindy nature. But he said to me, over text, “In a stickiness arms race, great ideas don’t stick around because they’re insufficiently sticky.”

So you can have an amazing idea that’s called protein bar, but it needs a better meme name.

GEORGE MACK: Yeah. And you can do the reverse as well, which is what people are very skeptical of, which is this is a cool sounding name, product, category, movement, whatever, but there’s no there there.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s right. It’s just meme and no…

GEORGE MACK: All meme, no substance. Yeah. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

And my—I mean, it’s already happened, so I don’t even think this is a crazy prediction. But you look at the 2024 election or insert future elections now, thanks to social media, that will be decided by who has the best memes, not who has the best policies. And once you see that, you can’t unsee it.

And I think the key thing to then factor in is now you have global Internet, and the next level you’re kind of seeing it now is Spotify. Two years from now, maybe we’ll be speaking right now in Portuguese because of this AI language translation.

So you then factor in language is no longer going to be a barrier. Internet adoption is going to be completely global as parts of the third world fully hop online and the older generation dies out. The ability for a meme to go from nothing to twenty-four hour infestation of the entire world like a virus, either positive and beautiful or negative and destructive, is about to happen.

Language Barriers and Meme Translation

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I was talking to somebody who his book title was a pun, right, which is kind of like a meme, like a play on words. It was like a book about sex called “You’re Doing It Wrong” or something like that. Right? And he mentioned that he was selling the translation rights, but because what you’re doing with puns specifically, which is a kind of meme, is playing in multiple interpretations of the same word or the same sentence.

But by design, that doesn’t translate over into other languages. So his great piece of advice was if you’re going to write a book title that you intend to go international, don’t use a pun because you can end up, like, talking about the flight of pigeons or something by accident because they’re trying to retrofit your pun to this new language, which doesn’t work, which means that you have to either compromise the pun entirely or keep the pun but lose what the actual context is.

GEORGE MACK: Well, on that specific point, to explain memes is essentially to say people judge your book by its cover. The age old advice of “don’t judge your book by its cover” is because people judge the book by its cover. So if you can spread it—they’re trying they’re trying to stop us from enacting our nature.

The Concept of Leverage

So one meme that I think is terrible, that I think is so important for people to understand is—and we use—me and you use this word a lot. Like, if you had to graph it in terms of words we speak after, like, “the” and “yeah” and a few others, “water,” this one’s up there, which is “leverage.” Like, we use leverage all the time.

And I originally got it from Naval’s book, Almanac, and when I heard it, I almost didn’t want to admit I didn’t fully understand it because I didn’t want to sound stupid. So I’d go and research it. I go, okay. So there’s this guy called Archimedes. And if you have enough leverage in engineering, you can create things where the input can produce a much greater output.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yep.

GEORGE MACK: So people will use it like that. So when I create a company, I try to create the cultural value around leverage. Right? So I created this Google Sheet, and everybody would input in there, like, the highest leverage task that week. So that was one of the values that we tried to create as a company.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yep.

GEORGE MACK: And every other value made sense. But we’d go we’d go in there and we’d do these weekly checking calls, and everyone would be like, “I’ll be honest with you. I don’t know what highest leverage task means.” And I was like…

And then you zoom out right now. You’ve got, like, the Instagram gurus who chat about “I’m the hardest working man in the room.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yep.

GEORGE MACK: And then you have the kind of meme of smart work versus hard work.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

GEORGE MACK: And none of it really sticks, especially coming from an educational system.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yep.

GEORGE MACK: And then when you begin to fully understand, like, code leverage, media leverage, capital leverage, labor leverage, it begins to stick a little bit more.

And I was thinking, how do you actually get this into an idea that begins to translate? One of the terrible ideas that I do have for this, which I’ll bring up because it’s on here, which is a lot of napkin maths, but it’s essentially I want to do this as a kid’s story, but I need to change the name to begin with. I animate it. It’s called “Hungover Jeff Bezos on His Yacht” versus “The World’s Hardest Working Man.”

So we have this story of these two individuals competing against each other. Because I identify with the world’s hardest working man. I grew up watching my Eric Thomas videos of, like, “you’ve gotta want it as bad as you want to breathe,” like, that kind of stuff.

And ultimately so let’s say, for example, we give this Instagram guy who talks about hard work. This guy’s better than everybody else because he doesn’t sleep. He works twenty-four hours a day. Right? Jeff, woken up at, like, eleven fifty, like, nagging headed. He’s probably got one of the best vitamin IV drips in the world, goes on his jet ski that day, probably does a Zoom call with his chess coach, like, whatever.

Who’s worked harder that day? If you judge it in the old fashioned interpretation that I think a lot of us have that don’t understand leverage because we don’t get engineering and things like that, you go, well, he’s worked twenty-four hours that day. Jeff’s done a few Slack messages.

But I was trying to go, well, what if you actually ran the napkin math? So right now, if you looked at it as purely as output, so this guy’s got twenty-four outputs of hours of manual work that he’s been doing.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Mhmm.

GEORGE MACK: Whereas Jeff’s been sat on his ass. If you look it like that, that’s twenty-four to zero. But all of a sudden, when you begin to quantify leverage, you go, ah, this begins to click a little bit.

So this is napkin math from about a year ago. So the point of napkin math is not to be in the comment section saying that this is right. I know some of these numbers are wrong, but just it’s for the metaphor.

So Jeff has 1.6 million people that work for Amazon. So let’s say they all work eight hours per day. Jeff’s achieved 20.8 million hours of work that day.

Then if you looked at robot leverage, so Amazon’s warehouse, when I looked at these statistics, has 500,000 roaming factory robots. AWS has 1.8 million servers. They all work 24/7 for him. That’s 55 million hours of robot work per day whilst he’s been sat on that yacht.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I know.

GEORGE MACK: I’m not even going to get into how much more output a robot can achieve per hour than—if he—let’s just give the hardest working guy that he can keep up with them. Okay.

Then you look at advertising leverage. Amazon spends $46 million per day on marketing. Assuming it costs him $20 to reach one thousand people, he’s receiving 2.3 billion impressions per day. Hardest working guy is going around knocking on doors, right, trying to sell his product. So Jeff’s advertising leverage is about the equivalent of doing 95 million hours of door knocking per day.

Then you look at media leverage. So Twitch gets 71 million hours of content viewed every day. Amazon Prime has 117 million subscribers. Let’s assume that the 10 percent watch one hour per day. That’s 11 million hours of content viewed every single day. So that’s 82 million hours of storytelling done in person that this guy would have to do.

And then let’s not go into all the other things you could think of related to Amazon. So hardest working guy in the room has worked twenty-four hours. Jeff sat on his yacht with a hangover and watching bits of succession and zooming away has achieved 244 million hours of output.

And then when you view it like that, the whole leverage complexity—the reason why leverage is a bad meme is because you need other topics and other realizations from engineering to understand it, which prevents it from spreading. But when you go, oh, hungover Jeff Bezos on his yacht versus hardest working man in the world, you could realize that in the twenty-first century, despite probably the PTSD from the education system, leverage is more important, but it’s a shit meme.

The Importance of Leverage in Work

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Sean Puri has this idea about what you work on is way more important than how hard you work, and he says hard work is very overrated. I think he refers to himself actively as a successful lazy man. And he optimizes for laziness and frictionlessness.

GEORGE MACK: And, yeah, it’s the same. You know, the janitor or some guy that’s working double or triple shifts, that amount of effort doesn’t have an in-kind return to them compared with somebody who is able to leverage code or media or labor or capital or even just picking the same amount of input that they’ve got with very limited leverage but on a better task, a task that has more potential upside long term.

The key thing is to remove the conversation around hours worked that we had from school and just be inputs, outputs. So I have this number of inputs. What number of outputs am I getting? And remove the concept of hours worked, remove everything else. And all of a sudden, that meme is a little bit stickier.

Whether that’s going to be a kid’s story or not, probably not. I need to adapt the title a bit, but I think to view leverage through that makes it an easier idea for people to understand. But the reason why leverage is a bad meme is because people don’t have the engineering knowledge.

It doesn’t spread, which is why it’s such a Silicon Valley concept, and I think this idea still hasn’t fully rippled through society. Don’t forget as well that exponentials and squares aren’t something that the human brain is built to work out. It’s like that, I want one square of, one piece of rice on the first square of the chessboard and two pieces of rice on the second square of the chessboard all the way up. And by the time you get to the final square on the chessboard, you’ve got more pieces of rice than there are particles in the universe or something.

We just don’t deal well with exponentials, which means that leverage inherently, given that it’s dealing with unfair multiplicatives. Right? It’s a multiplicative system rather than an additive system for the most part. It’s this times this, not this plus this. It’s just going to be tough to understand.

The Power of Effective Memes

GEORGE MACK: The best memes compress mass emotion into a simple contagious concept like “okay boomer” or “Karen.” What’s that mean? Well, first off, look at “okay boomer.” Who doesn’t understand that? Two words.

“Karen.” Who doesn’t understand that? “Make America great again.” Who doesn’t understand that? You can hate those memes, but it’s compressed so much emotion.

So let’s say the “okay boomer” one, it’s compressed so much emotion of the millennial and Gen Z being spoken down to by the boomer generation who have messed up a lot, and it’s completely compressed all that down, and boom, that spreads. Same with “Karen.” Same with even the words “make America great again.” Like, there’s so much emotion. Way more than its four words.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes. It’s way more than the constituent parts.

GEORGE MACK: Yes. Yes. And with memes, it’s all—I forgot who said it—it’s the idea of, “I’m sorry I didn’t write you a shorter letter, but I didn’t have time.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes. Yes. Yes.

GEORGE MACK: The people look at it and go, oh, that’s so unfair. I wrote this ten thousand word essay that nobody ever read versus this meme has spread. But you need to be able to optimize for that k factor, but you need to be able to compress as much emotion into that word for it to spread.

The Evolution of the Meme Industrial Complex

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Did the meme industrial complex used to be the purview of mainstream media? Were they ever creating memes effectively, or is this an Internet thing?

GEORGE MACK: Again, it’s a little bit reflexive in the sense that they both interact. Right? So what Rupert Murdoch would put on the news would be because he kind of knew what people would like, and then what people liked was kind of because what they saw on the news, and there’s this constant thing here.

So Rupert Murdoch or that generation of the meme industrial complex that own everything and could control the narrative. I actually think it’s ironic that they’ve made “Succession” now because they wouldn’t have been able to make it ten years ago because he had so much power.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Versus now, it’s like we can do what we want. It would’ve seemed more like a documentary than a drama.

GEORGE MACK: And you can see why the mainstream media dislikes social media so much because the mainstream media had the meme industrial complex and that they could put ideas out there and control the narrative. Whereas now, the meme industrial complex is essentially this bottom down approach of complete decentralized meritocracy to some extent.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. It’s all the users rather than the gatekeepers that are creating—

GEORGE MACK: A few algorithm developers who nobody—these faceless algorithm developers can just shift a little bit there and come and go, you know what? On YouTube now, we actually prefer long form podcasts in the algorithm. Boom. And that just completely shifts things.

So it’s weird how you’ve got these kind of faceless algorithm creators now and these face creators that own the meme industrial complex. The last memes or most of the memes that you see that come out of mainstream media are accidental memes.

So it’s a guy trying to propose to his wife at a baseball game or something that gets wiped out by a security guard or something. It’s not—it’s never something that is designed to be funny. It’s always the byproduct of something that was supposed to be something else, which has come through in that way.

Predicting Future Memes

GEORGE MACK: I’ve also got this idea about how if you want to be able to predict the future, look at a current cultural movement or meme that hasn’t had the inverse already made.

So 2020, COVID gets released. That summer, everyone has to stay in the house. 2021, Megan Thee Stallion starts talking about “hot girl summer.” Last year, you weren’t able to be free and liberated. Therefore, this year, you can be your best self. You glam up, go out with the girls, sleep with the guy, etcetera. 2022 is “feral girl summer,” which is, you know, treat yourself like an animal. Don’t wash. Don’t shave. Just put baggy clothes on and don’t take any care of yourself.

Another version. Pickup artistry comes out sort of late twenties, early twenty tens, then you get that sanitized by Me Too, which is a counterculture movement in some regards, not just to that, but to other stuff. Then you have red pill, then very quickly, you have MGTOW and black pill that comes out of it.

So if you want to predict the future of memes, look at a meme that’s been created that hasn’t had its inverse come out too, because every movement needs its counter movement in order to be able to balance it.

Because there is a market. There is a meme market for anything, which is not the thing which is currently popular. For every movement, there will always be—it’s like the equal and opposite force thing. For every meme, there is an equal and opposite meme that comes out.

Untapped Meme Potential

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, question for you is, what do you think is—you know, we had the chat last time of what is ignored by the media but will be studied by historians. And what we’re kind of saying there is, what’s a really important topic that hasn’t had its full meme moment yet? What do you think are super important topics that just haven’t been memed correctly? That’s really caught on yet or will catch on. Like, what ideas sound crazy today, but five, ten years from now, be like, “oh, yeah. That’s the thing.”

I think a lot of individual personalities, so this seems to be a very effective way to get memes to move, you know, like the meme of the sigma male, which is kind of the guy who steps outside of the hierarchy.

I don’t think that there’s very many good memes for women. I don’t think that there’s been many, like, archetypes. Most of them are, like, derogatory in a lot of ways. So, like, you know, like, the Karen, the party girl, the Dubai yacht chick. There’s not many there that I think are, like, almost aspirational in a way, and maybe this speaks to female personality and disposition that they don’t—you know, I don’t know about girls, but guys would happily have, like, He Man or The Rock or whatever on a bedroom poster wall.

But girls would also, a lot of the time, have guys, like some hot singer. I don’t know whether girls use role models and aspirational admirable figures. Like, if you went into a teenage girl’s bedroom and had a post from Jordan Peterson quotes on the wall, you think, like, let’s take you off to psychotherapy. So, yeah, certainly individuals in some ways, like memes for, aspirational memes for girls. I think that there’s a massive market for them. What about you?

The Underestimated Threat of Cybercrime

GEORGE MACK: This is, I think, one of the most important topics, but it’s so ugly and boring. And I’m fearsome of saying this because I can just feel people, like, skipping to the next YouTube chapter as soon as I say this, but give me, like, a minute to just say it. And it’s even the word now. Right? You’re going to go, right, cybercrime. Right?

It’s just—it’s like nobody takes it seriously, but it’s so important. And just to maybe give a bit of a story that’s going to help with this, have you heard of the Bangladeshi bank heist?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No.

GEORGE MACK: Now we’re talking. Right? This is going to blow your mind. And, again, it doesn’t sound good right now, but it’s going to be good.

So the biggest bank robbery in history was I think it’s about sixty million dollars in Brazil in about 2015, 2016. With cybercrime recently, they almost hacked one billion dollars from the Bangladeshi bank using the SWIFT system. Right?

For context, that year, the Bangladeshi GDP was, like, two hundred and thirty billion. So think with GDP as well. It’s movement of money. It’s not total money. If Chris sends George ten and I send it back, boom boom boom, that acts towards the GDP, but it’s just us exchanging money.

So imagine taking one billion dollars like that from a developing country immediately. And the only reason that failed—the only reason this isn’t—there will be, I think, five to within five to ten years, there will be a COVID-like moment.

Do you remember pandemics before COVID? It was like bird flu, swine flu. You’d just be like, “oh, the sun’s just trying to get clicks” and things like that. I remember I used to tell people about COVID in January, February. I won’t say who, but they used to call me conspiracy George for bringing up COVID. And now, obviously, pandemics are taken very seriously, but there will be a nine-eleven or a COVID-like moment for cyber where things get very, very dark, very fast.

I think the Bangladesh Bank heist is only a tiny example of that where you go from sixty million dollar robbery in person to one billion overnight. And the—you know, the only reason why it failed is because the hackers that were working on the system—so they emailed. They sent an email with a CV application. The person at the bank clicks on the CV, infects everything.

GEORGE MACK: Yep.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: They’re working on it for a year. They time it perfectly during the New Year’s holidays. Everything about this heist has gone perfect. Bear in mind this bank would only move about three hundred k around. The SWIFT system, so it goes to the Federal Reserve in America because it sees one billion, and they’re like, “yeah. Sure.” So it’s like the security systems weren’t in place.

The only reason it failed is because of two things. One, they had a typo for the addresses. So, literally, it didn’t fail because of the amount. It failed because of human error.

GEORGE MACK: Human error.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: They like, it was a really basic English spelling that they made a mistake. And then two, the bank in the Philippines they were sending it to was called Jupiter Street, and Jupiter was a company associated with Iranian money laundering. So it just happened to flag in the system.

Otherwise, it would have gone through. Both of which were human error. A billion would have been taken from Bangladesh, like one of the poorest countries in the world like that. And the impact that has and you then begin to realize what happens at one point when certain airlines get attacked, certain banking systems get attacked, and we’re so reliant. But because I say the word cybersecurity, and only three percent of the audience have carried on right now, it’s so boring.

The Tragic Decline of Rationality in Society

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] But we need stronger memes around it because it’s such an important topic. Wasn’t it, you told me some story about the salary that was offered for the British head of cybersecurity?

[GEORGE MACK:] So the head of cybersecurity in the UK, we spoke about this last time, got offered a salary on LinkedIn jobs. It was fifty-five to sixty-five thousand pounds for the UK – about eighty thousand dollars.

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] Which, listen, is obviously a great income for most of the world. But for the head of cybersecurity when you’re dealing with hackers that are trying to steal one billion dollars… It’s just evidently something but that’s specifically, I’m going to guess, a governmental problem because I’m going to presume the head of cybersecurity at Facebook is paid an ungodly amount of money because they are already red-pilled on just how big of a deal this is.

[GEORGE MACK:] Mhmm. But if Facebook goes down, it’s obviously a big issue. But if government systems go down, a lot worse. If the emotion caused by the meme is greater than the friction of spreading it, you’ve cracked the meme algorithm. It’s exactly that.

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] That is an example of a simple but not easy truth. That is all memes. Does the emotion outweigh the friction of spreading it? If so, you’ve created that positive one number that it begins to spread, spread, spread, spread, spread. So simple.

You’ve got one in here that’s the same as mine. “The easiest way to predict the next meme is to look at the current memes and bet on counter memes appearing.” You take that from me?

[GEORGE MACK:] Potentially.

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] It was my idea. “The fastest growing companies in the next ten years will have a chief meme officer working for them directly or indirectly.”

[GEORGE MACK:] I like, if you look at all these fast growing consumer businesses, they either have a chief meme officer in house. So you can think of these influencer celebrities that are creating…

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] A McGregor with Proper Twelve. The McGregor meme, and all the kind of sub memes that he creates around him. “Who the fuck is that guy?” and so on.

[GEORGE MACK:] Then product there, or they’ll have memes working via through them indirectly that they’ll ride on. So, like, we were chatting about Maric Health. This isn’t a plug. But, you obviously, your testosterone numbers going through the roof.

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] Yeah.

[GEORGE MACK:] And people – Huberman, the Huberman meme, people chatting about optimization. And I guess they do have Derek running it, but still riding that meme movement. If they would have done it five to ten years ago, it probably wouldn’t have any impact that it’s happening. But now chief meme officer indirectly or directly. Boom.

The Evolution of Memes and Skepticism

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] I think I learned about this word, “you’re glowing.” You taught me about that a while ago.

[GEORGE MACK:] Zach taught me about it, and then Mark brought it up as well. You know, that is like when someone looks like a federal plant, and they’re putting across information that is to persuade the populace, but people can see through the fact that they’re actually doing it on behalf of the CIA. “Ex-CIA agent says that CIA isn’t actually listening to your phone calls.” Mate, you’re glowing. That’s the sort of thing that they’ll say. But I think people are skeptical now even of memes.

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] Perfect example. Did you see what Gymshark did with Francis Ngannou where he broke that door?

[GEORGE MACK:] No.

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] Right. So Gymshark fed a video onto Reddit that they created of CCTV of a person that was supposed to be Francis Ngannou, didn’t turn out to be him, breaking the door of a corner shop, the glass door that was closed. And they staged it, created it, used the stunt double instead of Francis for the bit where the glass breaks, put Francis back in, had him get shouted at by this fake shopkeeper in a fake shop front, fed it using a burner account onto Reddit.

And then from Reddit, it got picked up by Twitter. And then from Twitter, it got picked up and signal boosted. And some people saw through it like “this looks like it because he’s wearing Gymshark. This looks like a plant from Gymshark.” But for the most part, made headlines, papers picked up on it, all the rest of it.

So, the contrived meme complex or the manipulated meme complex, like the MMC, is something that everyone’s skeptical about.

[GEORGE MACK:] I look at each platform now like a meme information highway, and each one produces different memes just due to the constraints of it. So the memes that get produced from TikTok are quite unique.

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] Correct. They don’t export particularly well.

[GEORGE MACK:] Whereas people that come out of YouTube, like yourself, slightly different. What’s interesting, though, is most memes that get created, you go back and it’s Reddit, it’s 4chan, maybe bits of Twitter. And it goes down the meme information highways, and then ends up at LinkedIn.

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] All roads lead to boomer Facebook. WhatsApp message from parents. I wonder whether one of the reasons that 4chan and Reddit worked particularly well is are written memes the most robust of all?

Because you can turn something that works on written into video, into spoken, but the reverse isn’t necessarily true. Like, there was that one of the dude drinking ocean fresh cranberry juice whilst skateboarding down the street listening to some song from some band, and then this song’s now number one across the world because there’s one dude skateboarded whilst drinking cranberry juice. Sales of cranberry juice went through the roof, and he’s now the ambassador for Ocean Fresh or something. That doesn’t necessarily translate across onto written word, but most written word memes can be translated across and do get used potentially.

[GEORGE MACK:] But I think another factor too – have you heard the lollipalooza effect? It’s where you stack multiple biases. So on that specific point, I think you’ve got that, but it’s not just that. It’s also the fact that most people on there are pseudonymous and anonymous, which means they can just see the Overton window here and go, “I’m going to go through it.” And then, ultimately, it’s the memes that shift the Overton window with time. But the ability for them to be pseudonymous and anonymous and then create something that they can go into territories that right now, the meme industrial complex won’t touch, and then they push it through.

Mainstream Media and Scarce Resources

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] I had this idea about how there is a lot of derogation of mainstream media at the moment. Like, mainstream media is dying, and no one really cares about it anymore. And it’s all about independent media, and it’s all about YouTube and podcasts and stuff like that. But what you do forget is that there is still quite a lot of status associated with going on mainstream media because it’s a scarce resource.

There is an unlimited number of YouTube videos that everybody can upload. There’s no status or prestige associated with uploading a YouTube video, getting lots of subscribers or getting lots of plays or having lots of followers on TikTok or whatever. But anyone that’s got an iPhone can work Twitter or work TikTok or work YouTube, but there’s only two hundred Dr. Phil guests per year.

So because it’s inherently a scarce resource, there is still value and prestige associated with it because of the selection effect. Oh, you’ve had to be preselected. It’s like the Hunger Games.

So I think that something that’s probably not being priced in is first, the general scarce resource prestige still associated with mainstream media because it’s a limited resource. And secondly, the huge swath of boomer parents and people who aren’t chronically online who see Dr. Phil – you know, all of middle America, that whole daytime TV thing, the Loose Women thing. Like, they still move culture. They just don’t move culture in a way that we care about at the moment.

This is really interesting just as a side point. Is it Liberty Mutual or someone? It’s this bank in America, and they’re playing it really well. It’s like, “we can’t stop you from becoming your parents, but we might be able to help you invest and save.” And all of the adverts are about younger people complaining about problems that are beyond their age, like someone who’s parking over two parking spaces, and they’re shaking their fist kind of like their parents would do or someone that’s cutting the hedge too early in the morning or something.

And the point is, you’re going to grow into complaining about the complaints that your parents have got. So they’re using the meme of “okay boomer” as almost self-deprecating for us all to future project ourselves out into that. But, yeah, mainstream media, scarce resource. What do you think?

[GEORGE MACK:] Again, I think there’s a little bit of a lollapalooza that exists as well in the sense, yeah, it’s a scarce resource. It still has a shadow of its former self. Like, even if I see a seventy-year-old boxer, I know who that guy used to be, and he could still – even if I could beat him up now, he still has that shadow of his former self. So I think it’s that.

It’s interesting when I did the Fox News thing for the Caelin cocaine phone, which followed the most serious news stories – it was me in Amsterdam with sliders on my feet and a blazer chatting about that. And that, even though it probably got way less views than this or anything else that I’ve done, was treated so differently because of the fact it was mainstream media.

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] Prestige. Yeah.

Conceptual Inertia and Changing Ideas

[GEORGE MACK:] There’s this idea called conceptual inertia, which is that it takes a long time for ideas to change even if the science does. I spoke to this science historian, and he was talking about the development of science and then belief over time. So for instance, when you get the geocentric as opposed to the heliocentric view of the solar system that it’s not the Earth that’s at the center. It’s the sun that’s at the center.

And when that happened, even though it was after a while first off, it was heretical, then it was exploratory, then it was proven, but tons and tons of the populace just hadn’t come along for the ride. Ideas die one generation at a time, and it takes a good chunk of time for people to catch up, and it’s kind of the same with mainstream media.

Not only are there still people around that hold mainstream media – even I do to some degree. You know, you see some person on Dancing with the Stars, you’re like, “oh, well done for that person,” even if I wouldn’t want to do it.

So not only is there still people around that are living that, but also even once they’re gone, the echo of what they valued is still valued, and it takes a little bit of time for this stuff to go away.

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] On that point, though, of ideas die one generation at a time, is there any way to speed that up? Because technology is changing so much faster and faster. How do you deal with, like, GPT-3, GPT-4, and people being able to catch up?

[GEORGE MACK:] I don’t think there’s a solution for it, mate. I think that humans run at the speed that they run at. I think you can overclock humans in the same way that you can overclock technology. You’re just playing this game, and we’re going to move along.

And what you end up with if you try and do it too quickly is you end up with fire hosing, which is the problem of overloading people with information. They begin to distrust all narratives overall because they just can’t get “but first, it was this thing, and then it’s this thing.”

COVID. Everybody during COVID. Almost everybody during the last election. Almost everybody during the Israel-Hamas war, which we’re not talking about. Like, it’s this thing, and then no, it’s not. It’s actually this thing. It wasn’t them that did it, and then, actually, yeah, it is those. And, no, it’s not – your story was wrong. And what people end up doing is just saying, “alright, I’ll check out.”

So the answer I’ve had for this is if you look at something like David Deutsch’s “Beginning of Infinity,” which I think is an amazing idea, but the meme is tough. The problem that exists is – and we spoke about this before – where five years ago, you cringe at your former self. But what would have probably sped that up, maybe doing five months rather than five years to realize those mistakes, was thinking “five years from now, I’m going to cringe at former me. What are those things?”

So there’s almost this simple expression I developed, which is, like, everything is wrong is the first bit of it. And you just assume every belief that I hold is wrong. Everything George and Chris has said to some extent is wrong. Anything that defies the laws of physics is wrong and will be – we will look back at it five to ten years now.

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] Loosely held. Yeah.

[GEORGE MACK:] But the problem with that is it just opens up this vortex of, like, what do I do? The flaws are gone.

The Tragic Decline Of Rationality In Society

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] Like, you’re just in this spinning infinite Rick and Morty loop, and you don’t know what is what. And people would prefer to have strong beliefs than just complete nihilism and complete “everything’s wrong.” So the conclusion I have with that is that everything’s wrong, but there are better or worse ideas.

[GEORGE MACK:] So constantly looking at, okay. I’ve got this new idea in my head. It can have a placeholder there, and I like it, and it was better than the previous idea that I had. And then you’re constantly playing this infinite game of stacking up knowledge, but always realizing that what will happen is you’ll get the new idea, and then you think that idea is right. How many times have me and you developed some new morning routine, become completely addicted to it and being like, “This is it. This is the answer. I found the answer.” And then a couple of months later, we go, “It wasn’t the answer.”

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] The Lindy effect works so well with that. If a person sends you about this new app, new meditation habit, new x, y, z morning routine – how long have you been doing it? Once you’ve been doing it for six months, let’s check-in, because then it’s serious. Tiago Forte, the reason that he doesn’t use anything other than Evernote is he refuses to use software that’s not ten years old or older. Like, it has to have been around for ten years. It’s basically the exact same as what you’re talking about there. Louise Perry taught me yesterday this great quote, “Traditions are the experiments that worked.”

[GEORGE MACK:] Yeah. That’s the thing that people are often defending was once the replacing thing.

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Because how many things are axiomatically just unmovable or unmoving from when it first ever happened?

Trojan Horses to Avoid

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] What’s this “Trojan horses to avoid” thing?

[GEORGE MACK:] So I was having a phone call with a good friend of mine, and his business is doing very, very well. And he says to me, “I’ve stopped listening to all business podcasts.” I was like, “Hold on. Your business is doing really, really well, and you’ve also stopped consuming new information about business?” He goes, “Yeah. I just watch NFL stuff.” I’m like, am I getting midwitted meme right here? And I was like, “Why is that?”

He goes, “Well, the problem was particularly with the stuff that isn’t just Lindy business content, like new ideas, this industry is popping off.” He would just get shiny object syndrome. And the critique of that self-improvement space of “how can you watch football?” is the problem with him with the business podcast is that it was like Trojan content or Pyrrhic porn, like a Pyrrhic victory.

It was Trojan content in the sense that he felt it was good for him, but it was actually harming him. And I’d say that is often a lot worse than the things that you know are going to harm you. So if you eat a takeaway and you know it’s bad for you, I think that’s not as bad as thinking something’s healthy, a Trojan horse getting in and it’s actually really bad for you.

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] How was the business podcast? Just dig into how they were Trojan horses a bit more.

[GEORGE MACK:] Well, in the sense that he has a business that’s working really well, and he just has to exploit and focus and work hard. Whereas when they’re then going, “Oh, there’s this new AI thing that’s popping off and people are getting funding here,” or “This guy’s exited his business for ABC,” he’d just get envious. He’d get shiny object syndrome versus just putting on the football. He’s like, “Switch the brain off. Know what I need to do.”

And you can see these Trojan horses that exist everywhere. So, like, you could have what I call a “Trojan pay rise” where you get this job that offers double the salary, but you stop learning as a result. And on the one hand, yeah, you’ve got this thing that feels like you’ve made progress. But actually, on a long enough time horizon, it’s going to massively reduce your potential because you’re no longer learning. So looking at these Trojan horses everywhere.

A long commute would probably be one of those. You know, we’ve been talking a lot about hidden observable metrics, and a really great observable metric is salary, and a really great hidden one is commute length. The derogation of your energy to do things when you get home, the quality of your relationships and your friendships, the amount of time that you have to be able to learn new things. And, yeah, you can trade in your ability to upgrade yourself for a better salary, but over a long enough time horizon, what was it that was going to give you more happiness or satisfaction or even salary in the end? It was presumably going to be your skills and the rapidity of you to be able to upgrade them. So, yeah, that’s very interesting.

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] Have you noticed in your life any Trojan horses that you’ve let sneak in?

Information Diet and Content Clarity

[GEORGE MACK:] I’d say certain bits of content. I find I’m a lot more specific with my information diet now. I used to try and keep on top of the world’s current events because I felt like I needed to be a responsible citizen, and I needed to be on top of things. And I realized that the current thing would just disappear. Then there’s this constant new current thing that would then disappear.

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] Peral calls it the “perpetual now.”

[GEORGE MACK:] Yeah. By the time it’s on Twitter, it’s like the peak stock price. By the time everybody’s talking about it, it’s as big as it’s going to get. So avoiding constantly keeping on top of all the world’s cutting content, which I used to think made me an informed citizen.

Because people would use the term “ignorance is bliss.” And I go, you know you’re in this Nietzschean upside-down society where people are using bliss as a shaming mechanism. Because I realized this: there’s like 500 million tweets uploaded per day, 500 hours of content uploaded to YouTube per minute, and I think something like 67 million people die per year. Right? So we’re all in the ignorance gutter. But it’s like some of us will be looking at the stars, and I think you have to be so specific with that information diet because by definition, you cannot consume all the world’s information.

So I used to have my Twitter trending topics set to Angola. So I’d keep up to date with basically, on Twitter, you’d have the trending topics in your region, and it would be like I’d get distracted by all these complex issues. And I just feel like shit after it. It’s like Trojan content.

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] So I just updated it to Angola and know a lot about Angola now. Unfortunately for me, because as you’ve realized you can’t hack it with Angola, I’m still in the UK based on Twitter, which means that at least twice a week at the moment, Chris Williamson trends – Chris Williamson MP, of course, the unfortunately named Labor MP, I think it’s Derbyshire that he’s a part of, very antisemitic, which means given the current geopolitical climate, it’s a bad time to be a Chris Williamson at the moment.

But I always used to think whether or not he would look and see his name trending, but it not be him and think, “What’s my Love Island alter ego done this time? He’s gone on another reality TV show.” I’ve got this live show with James Smith in Dubai in a couple of months’ time, next month, actually. And I wondered given what Chris Williamson MP has been talking about is very pro-Middle Eastern, whether there’s going to be a huge welcome party for me as I step off the plane at DXB Airport and how disappointed they will be when this Chris Williamson strides off the plane.

[GEORGE MACK:] Reality so far has just been an SEO warfare between you two and everybody else watching this. It’s just NPCs in the simulation. Do you ever watch the one with Jet Li, that film?

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] No.

[GEORGE MACK:] It’s like he in this other universe, he’s able to move between like 350 universes or whatever, and there’s a version of you in each of them. And if you kill yourself, the power of all of you gets shared between you. So this guy tries to become “the one,” this evil Jet Li, goes around killing all of the other Jet Li’s in all of the other different universes. And that’s kind of the SEO battle between you and Chris Williamson Derbyshire MP at the moment.

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] On the information diet, looping back around because there was a bit of an infinite vortex there. With the information diet hack I recommend, and people think this takes way longer than it is, but I do warn people that you will stare deeply into the abyss, and the abyss information hazard stares deeply back into you. YouTube, they should remove this, but YouTube has this button where you can see your history.

And I clicked on it, and I was like, if I just go through the last hundred videos that I watched, it takes about five minutes to do. And I just rank them in terms of regret, neutral, and “glad I watched that.” And seventy-two percent of the content I watched, I bucket under regret. So that’s an example of Trojan content.

[GEORGE MACK:] The post-content clarity thing was an idea that I came up with, to try and help me. It’s exactly that, just less statistical. While you’re watching something, it’s almost always compelling even if it’s bullshit for you and making you feel worse because if it wasn’t compelling, you would be watching something that was. It’s like the meme evolution of the MrBeast countdown to the one billion dollar yacht that he’s going to spend time on or whatever. Right? Like, that’s the most compelling piece of content.

So even stuff that you don’t like is compelling in the moment, or else you would have switched and watched something more compelling. But it’s only after – it’s like your post-coital pillow talk with yourself after you’ve done a session on YouTube where you get to say, “Okay. How did that stuff make me feel? Do I want to ring my friends? Do I want to go outside? Do I feel like the world is against me or for me? Do I feel like I can go and achieve things? Do I feel more educated, more wise, more in tune with myself, or do I feel the opposite?”

And a lot of the time, I think the things that you watch are limbically hijacking and compelling, but the after effect, like the comedown, the content comedown is so strong that, if you were able to future project yourself forward and realize what’s the hangover that I’m going to get, the content comedown I’m going to get from this, the post-content clarity, the pillow talk that you have with yourself actually would remind you that it’s not worth it.

And YouTube actually is a platform where this is kind of useful because a few options you can put in, “don’t recommend channel.” If you just see something on your home screen, you can just press the three dots and say “don’t recommend channel,” and you’ll never see that channel again unless you search for it. It’ll never just randomly appear on your feed, which is phenomenal.

So I think that, you know, if we’re talking about crafting and shaping the information landscape that we’re a part of, and it’s all esoteric and philosophical and stuff. But from a tactical perspective, that’s one thing. If people use Twitter on desktop, which I do, I don’t have the app on my phone. I very rarely use it on my phone. TweeMex, which may now be called Tweepy, is a way that you can see the most popular tweets from people. But it’s a Google Chrome extension that when you’re on your home screen, it actually sits over the top of the trending news. It’ll hide trending news. So you can’t put yourself in Angola.

Well, you can, but it doesn’t work. But you can use TweeMX or Tweepy, and the Google Chrome extension will hide that and replace it with top tweets from one of the people that you follow. I think we’ve probably got about five years left of this algorithmic warfare of trying to get you to stay on platform as long as possible, because as soon as more and more AI tools come on and then you begin to have these dynamic conversations of how you want to feel based off these algorithms, I think we’ll look back at this as a very, very weird time in history.

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] When most content was created by humans as opposed to robots?

[GEORGE MACK:] No.

The Customization of Algorithms

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] In the sense that to some extent, but more importantly, for example, you see the difference when you go from YouTube to YouTube Premium, and you can skip certain things and you can download things. Why can’t I just customize my algorithm more?

[GEORGE MACK:] Like, why can’t I have a kale algorithm during the week and then a cocaine algorithm on Saturday night versus this kind of static algorithm? Because the problem with algorithms, I actually realized when I was doing that YouTube order, YouTube is amazing when you use it for search, and it’s such a high agency thing where you’re sitting there thinking and going, “Okay, I want to learn about x, so I want to do a, b, c.” And you search it versus the explore page when it’s just fundamentally low agency. Because by definition, it’s trained on your past data, so it’s keeping you stuck in the past. Whereas when you’re actually searching on YouTube for topics, you’re actually breaking out of the past and creating a new dataset that’s training on.

There’s multiple use cases. Uber does this very well, actually, where at different times of the day, I take different journeys. So if it’s first thing in the morning, it’ll know that I tend to want to go to the gym. If it’s middle of the day, there’s a couple of restaurants that I typically go to.

If it’s on a Wednesday at this time, it knows that I usually go and get an appointment at this place or it’s a haircut or whatever, and it knows that I go from certain places to other places. Very well done, right? But that’s because there’s multiple use cases at multiple periods of the day.

YouTube hasn’t yet realized that I only watch long-form documentaries about the in-depth trench warfare strategies of World War One at night to fall asleep. So I listened to some Ken Burns documentary or some long documentary, like some eleven-part psychoanalysis of Hitler that I’m deep into at the moment. That only happens in the evening, but it means that it resurfaces it to me during the day.

So there’s multiple uses at multiple times, and you know, like, can go from dark mode to light mode. It’s like, do I want to go from learning mode to entertainment mode?

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] But I don’t think that seems to be likely just because what the platforms always want you to be in is “click on” mode. Right? They don’t want you to have agency over what it is. They just want maximized time on-site.

[GEORGE MACK:] Let’s outsource it to—don’t forget, especially YouTube, that algo is a black box. If you were to go to YouTube engineers and say, “Tell us what you’re doing. Show us the algorithm.” They’re like, “Yeah. What? Do you think we know? Do you think we know what our algorithm does? We set it like two reward functions: time on-site, click-through. That’s it.” And then just let it run.

It’s just this recursive nightmare where everyone descends towards the UFC knockout compilation. All the way down the stack.

The Forgetting Paradox

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] What’s the forgetting paradox?

[GEORGE MACK:] So thanks to your Sam Harris podcast, I started going more and more down a mindfulness rabbit hole.

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] Bunch of people did that. I was with someone—he would have said that. It’s so good.

[GEORGE MACK:] And within that, he has this few things that I had up the back of it that then created the forgetting paradox, which is you start to observe your thoughts, and Sam presents this idea of, like, think of a candle. And he goes, “Well, are you that candle?” It’s like, “Well, no. Of course, I’m not that candle.” So it’s like, “Why do you therefore identify with every other thought?”

And then he has this scenario where it’s like, think of or basically wait for the next thought to appear in your head and try and predict it as it’s happening. Sorry. My one was so niche. When I realized I wasn’t controlling my own thoughts, it was just Ian Rush cutting in on the left wing. It was like this former football player who retired like eight years ago. I’m like, that’s almost like a dream state. And I was like, that’s why he called it “Waking Up.” Right? That’s fantastic.

And the thing that I hadn’t heard Sam talk about that I realized off the back of that was actually, I’ll ask you this question now. How many thoughts, like, clear sentence thoughts do you remember from yesterday?

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] Very few. Almost none.

[GEORGE MACK:] Can you think of any? Like a sentence?

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] One over dinner that I spoke to Alex about who’s debating Ben Shapiro today, but I didn’t say it to him because he was talking.

[GEORGE MACK:] So would you remember one thought from yesterday? What about the day before? I assume day before zero, right?

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] Yeah, I think so.

[GEORGE MACK:] So you had ten thousand to seventy thousand thoughts per day, and you captured one. Anyone listening at home, pause it and just go, how many thoughts do I remember from yesterday? Like, clear sentences. Not “I feel hungry” or whatever. Clear sentences.

So from a twenty-four hour window, kind of like Twitter or TikTok, the mind’s thoughts completely disappear. And it’s quite a useful tool that then when a thought loop appears, you just go, “This is going to disappear tomorrow.”

And you realize the forgetting paradox is—and this is not just at the individual psychological level, it’s at the general societal level—we forget how many things we forget because by definition, we’ve forgotten them. And if we hadn’t forgotten them, therefore, we would have remembered them.

The same way you had ten to seventy thousand thoughts yesterday and you remembered one. But you don’t realize how many thoughts you forgot because by definition, you completely forgot them.

And you see this with trending topics as well where it comes and then someone will mention that and you’ll go, “I haven’t thought about that in years.” It’s only when that pops back in that you see the forgetting paradox.

Capturing Life’s Moments

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] That guy cutting back in on the left wing. Yeah. Well, you’re very good at this. It’s one thing I’ve changed my mind upon as a result of this. Like, there’s probably a whole wave of guys that listen to your podcast who are just ghost Instagram guys. They don’t really post to social media. But one of the second and third order consequences of that is you don’t capture much of your life.

And I’m sitting here now at twenty-nine. I’ve always avoided photos and videos because I didn’t want to be seen as that vain guy on Instagram. But I think something you’re very good at is capturing content. And as I get older, you realize how important that is because you go, “I need to decouple this.”

[GEORGE MACK:] I realized this too that coming from, like, whatever a Love Island background. The problem of that is I dissociated taking photos with posting on social media and being gauche.

I did lunch on Sunday from the plane, with Douglas Murray in this nice restaurant somewhere. I had Crocs on, and Douglas is in a full suit, and we had lunch. And it was four hours, and we got to have this great conversation. And I was like, I want to remember this. Not that I would forget it in any case, but I want to properly remember this.

But you’re like, when do you take a photo? “Oh, mate. Come here. Let’s take a photo.” But I was like, hang on a second. No. Like, this will—when that resurfaces on my memories or whatever, I’m not taking a photo to post it on social media. But because most people only take photos so that they can then post them on social media, I dissociated taking photos and remembering my life with being a vain Instagram idiot. Not the same. We need to make photos great again for guys.

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] Particularly. Decouple taking photos from thinking that you are creating content, or being narcissistic or doing this to—

[GEORGE MACK:] Correct. And that’s even worse if you’re a content creator. Right? If you’re someone that’s posting stuff on the Internet, you’re like, “Oh, here we go again. Better switch the work face on.” But it’s not like that. It’s like, I’m just taking a photo to be with my friends.

Concretizing Thoughts

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] But I wonder about how much people think about the focus on the thoughts that arise, how much they consider what they’re going through right now to be unbelievably important. You forget how many things you’ve forgotten because you’ve forgotten how much you forgot.

This has always been a justification for me to get people to force thoughts into words, either spoken, written, even art in some regards, but I think it’s best to do it in actual words. Because I’ve said this a million times on the show, but when you have a thought, it’s like a cloud. Right? It’s like trying to hold smoke. It’s like this wispy, ephemeral kind of—it’s a smell. It’s like this ambiance that you’ve gotten. You’re like, “Yeah, I kind of know what it is.”

So, okay. Tell me. Like, tell me what that idea is. And then you try and squeeze it down into words, and you go, “I actually don’t have any idea about this.”

And I remember before I had the podcast, after I’d started thinking about things more seriously, but before I had an outlet that caused me to be rigorous and highly scrutinize what I was thinking about, I had ideas that I didn’t know I had ideas that I didn’t know. Right? This sense, but I’d never forced it to take form, and it concretizes things. That’s why writing is such a good tactic for this or having conversations with people that you care about.

You know, the strategy of recording a podcast with a friend that you’re never going to publish, like thirty minutes once per week, put the voice recorder on. If you don’t want to be a content creator or you just can’t be bothered or you’re not confident enough yet, sit down with a friend, press record, have a conversation about whatever you want, but it’s focused. It’s rigorous.

The Balaji Transformer and CBT

[GEORGE MACK:] Well, there’s a few things here. So one, there’s this idea I stole from Balaji, which I call the Balaji transformer, which is when you’re wanting to become creative. He tries to understand everything from a written perspective, then from an algorithm—like, he’ll create an algorithm of the same piece, then he’ll speak it out loud, then he’ll draw it on a whiteboard like Walt Disney’s business plan map. And when you transform it from thought to words to written to visual drawing, that action of transforming is where the creativity begins to occur or the clarity.

On this specific point, though, relating to the forgetting paradox that begins to exist as a result—particularly going back to CBT that we spoke about at the beginning. This is such midwit simple stuff but it’s so good. Like, we talked about the CBT triangle at the beginning.

The next thing that they get you to do is—let’s say you have a recurring thought of, “I’m a loser.” Like, something really dark. The natural thing, the Instagram gurus are like, “No. You believe in yourself! Pump your chest up.”

So in CBT, what they’ll get you to do is just write down the thought that you have and the ability to move it from mind to paper, and you just kind of look at it there. And then the next thing, which is great, what they do is rather than just try and fight that thought, which then kind of balloons it more and more because you’re repressing it, it’s like, “Well, what’s five bits of evidence that support that?”

It’s like, “Well, I’m losing touch with all my friends. I’ve not been to the gym in weeks. I thought I’d be here by twenty-five or thirty-five, and I’m not there.” And you write down all those reasons, and then you get all the air out of the balloon of that thought.

And then in CBT, it just goes, “Okay. What’s all the evidence that you haven’t considered?” It’s like, “Well, when I go to this party, people are so happy to see me.” And then at the end, kind of like the jury, the for and against, you just go, “Well, based off all the evidence I have now, what’s the more useful potential?”

On this specific point, have you heard of “true but not useful” from Derek Sivers, which is so good, which is this idea of not true but useful?

[CHRIS WILLIAMSON:] Yeah. I’ve been playing with something similar, which is, figuratively true but literally false and literally true but figuratively false. Whereas we had that chat about determinism. Right? Whereas I think determinism is potentially true but harmful.

[GEORGE MACK:] And they’re good information has it. What I realized now for the determinism debate, just say, “I completely agree with you guys. Unfortunately, I’m just a hundred percent determined to believe free will is true. And I’m just determined. I can’t change it.”

But a good example that Sivers has there is “not true, but useful” beliefs. And essentially, anything outside of physical reality to some extent can fall in that category of it might not be true, but what’s useful? And with cognitive behavioral therapy, you can just analyze both for and against and then come to your own conclusion.

Figuratively True vs. Literally True

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The figuratively true but literally false, literally true but figuratively false is great. So, porcupines can throw their quills, literally false. Figuratively, good to steer clear of the porcupine. Religion throughout time looked at pigs as uniquely sort of morally dirty animals, literally false, but figuratively, their flesh does carry a higher pathogen load typically than other animals like for like, so let’s not eat them. Good.

The reverse, literally true but figuratively false or functionally useless would be a different way to put it, belief that free will doesn’t exist. Okay? Everyone seems to say all the smart people seem to say that’s the case, and all of the people that seem to have some counterargument to it, it’s all like lexical Brazilian jiu-jitsu where they actually change what free will means. Like, Dan Dennett kind of does this.

He just sort of kicks the can down the road. All of the compatibilism stuff seems to kind of kick the can down the road. But I spiraled an ex-club manager into a two-week depression because I sent him forty-five minutes of Sam Harris on Joe Rogan red-pilling him about free will. He didn’t leave the house for two weeks because he’s like, “Well, if I’ve got no free will, it’s pointless.”

That’s information hazard. I don’t need to know about that. I definitely don’t need to believe it, I don’t need to put any stock in believing it. So I guess it’s a bit of a slippery slope if the only things that you believe are functionally the things that are beneficial to you because you can end up actually, no. Because useful is the keyword, not beneficial.

GEORGE MACK: Useful. Because self-deluding yourself to something that’s so grandstanding and harmful isn’t useful. It’s anything that’s fundamentally useful to you and the people around you.

Ideas That Sound Crazy But Will Be Normal Soon

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What’s the new ideas that sound crazy but will be normal ten to twenty years from now?

GEORGE MACK: So, obviously, last time we had the “what is ignored by the media but will be studied by historians” and “what ideas sound crazy today, but we’ll look back and go, oh, shit.” Kind of like when the Internet comes along, and everyone was mocking it, and boom, we’re here now.

I have a list of these. So one, which is my greatest meme I’ve ever created. Going back to cyber that it’s kind of an ugly industry, one industry that might be uglier is plumbing. As a result, there’s so many entrepreneurs creating boot bands, Oura rings, trackers, glucose, sport. It’s super sexy.

Creating a smart toilet – the total addressable market is huge. If you have a smart toilet, and the meme I created was like the toilet speaking to you, which is like, “Good news, you’re hydrated. Bad news, you’ve got chlamydia.” And a smart toilet could feasibly eradicate all STIs and STDs like that. The amount of data that’s in a person’s waste that exists, but nobody wants to touch that because it’s a bit uncomfortable.

Another similar strand to this, which I don’t like to say out loud, but we’re going to have to. MindGeek, the porn company that owns every single porn site you can think of, had the biggest technological monopoly of all time, but nobody spoke about it. There were no government bodies getting involved because they didn’t want to touch it. And I think a lot of these ideas are potentially icky.

AI and Dating Apps

Another one I think about is with AI coming along right now, all my single friends complain about dating apps that they hate the swiping. They like the dates, but they hate the swiping. And when dating apps came along, it was seen as the ickiest thing. People mocked it, but now, like, is it something like fifty percent of people meet their potential partner online?

And everything else has gone through the floor in terms of how they meet. The only one that’s gone up is restaurants and bars. Have you seen this? So the only one that goes up in that chart of how did you meet outside of dating apps, because dating apps is at the whole market, like Marc Andreessen’s “software eating the world,” is restaurants and bars. And I’m convinced that’s nonsense. I’m convinced it’s people who met on dating apps that don’t want to say that they met on dating apps because there’s a huge bracket of those.

So dating apps is eating the whole market. And I think with AI coming along, it’s going to be so obvious where it moves to a more matchmaking model where you’re not swiping based off your datasets, and then you’re getting few specific candidates. Eta dot AI.

I’m pretty sure that this is like Algo matchmaker. It’s a combination of, I think, personal, individual, actual functional human and AI matchmaking. It’s for people who want long-term relationships. And, yeah, they’re trying to use datasets to find compatibility between people. It makes sense.

It’s like the anti-dating app dating app. This is manually swiping and judging it purely off looks, then you meet them, and it’s completely different, and they don’t look that way, and they’ve lied. It’s a completely broken system.

Pseudonymity and Virtual Influencers

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s looking at what will be accepted as a plausible future technology. I certainly don’t think—I know that you’ve been on this for a while. You were pretty sure that pseudonymity on the Internet would become more widely accepted. I still don’t think that that’s going to be the case. Where do you sit on that now?

GEORGE MACK: I’ve got a weird opinion on this one. I could be so—bear in mind, all these—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Because all of your other opinions have been so normal so far.

GEORGE MACK: All of these opinions, I think, will ultimately—there’s high risk in it. If a lot of them are likely to fail because by definition, if they sound weird today, it’s because they’re weird or they’re wrong. But I do think you’re already seeing these virtual influencers come along.

And I think you’ll have the pseudonymity combined with a virtual influencer. Because if you look at traditional media, reality TV was really late. Only came along in the nineties. But with social media, it’s always been reality TV.

There’s no James Bond in social media. There’s no Spider-Man in social media. There’s no Superman. There’s no Batman of these characters with IP that begin to exist. So I do think that’s where—there’s a guy we spoke about called the Cultural Tutor on Twitter, and he’s just gone.

So I do think that’s got potential, but I don’t think it’s necessarily as big—the pseudonymity thing hasn’t taken off yet. But is that because it won’t take off yet or because it’s had certain technological restrictions?

The Value of Speaking Coaches

I’d say the other one, which you red-pilled me on this. So me and you were on a flight, like, three years ago. This is inside the actor studio.

And Chris is like, this is bear in mind, Chris’s podcast at that point—we’re on a beach after that flight, and he goes, “If I can get things to a hundred thousand subscribers, I think I’ll be happy.” And you say to me on that flight, we got our face masks on, you go, “I’m thinking of working with a speaking coach.”

And I was like, as a friend, I was like, do I say something here? Because I don’t think this is the right move. And in my defense, I was concerned that you’d go full politician. It would sterilize any character I had. When politicians speak like this, and it just immediately is horseshoe theory. I was concerned that would happen to you. Too much risk.

And I told you that, and you rightfully ignored me. And then, like, three years later, I’m listening to that Rogan podcast, and he said that the way you pronounce words, if he was running for president, he would vote for you.

And I texted you going, “One, I’m sorry. I was wrong. Two, can I get an intro?” I wanted an intro to the speech coach.

So I do wonder whether charisma will become the new—so the same way Instagram made people concerned more about how they look, voice memos, podcasts, recorded Zoom calls, remote work, people hearing themselves back will begin to become a bigger and bigger thing.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s a very good point. We’re definitely being more surveilled—scrutinizes your delivery, right, in a way that you didn’t do previously.

Have we seen people take writing classes so they can do better Facebook statuses? I’m not sure.

GEORGE MACK: But even going back to what we said earlier of risk becoming a meme, and then people at least just think about it. Whether there’ll be more people doing exactly what you did, probably not. But I think it will become an area that people are a lot more mindful of. The same way people who work out aren’t necessarily paying for a PT.

The Gap in the Game

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s true. The gap in the game was something I think I introduced you to as well. This idea that there are two ways to live, either comparing yourself to where you want to be or comparing yourself to where you were. And one of them is like running toward the horizon, which is every step that you move forward, you are inevitably going to push the desires that you have one step further away from yourself.

Morgan Housel’s quote about the best way to win the game is to stop moving the goalposts. And I had this conversation with Dan Bilzerian over the weekend and said, every time that you achieve something, what you’re doing is positing a new minimum bar, which you have to get over.

Fantastic. I’ve just done this many plays or made this piece of art that sold for a particular amount of money or whatever. How exciting. And almost immediately, there is this sort of postcoital realization that, oh my god. That’s the new bar for my best performance. That’s really high. That means I now need to be even better at my next thing.

And someone recently won the largest lottery in history, a one billion dollar lottery. Someone just won that. From a life trajectory perspective, that’s potentially one of the most disastrous things that you could have happen to you. Because how are you ever going to have a better day than the day you woke up and found out that you’d won a billion dollars?

It’s the argument is, slow success strategy would be to purposefully try and drag out the wins that you have. So Warren Buffett style. A tactical way that you could do this would actually be let’s say that you start to accumulate more wealth, financial freedom, and stuff like that, and you can afford your absolute dream car.

But instead of buying the absolute dream car, you buy one of the dream cars that’s kind of en route to that one. The fifty percent or the seventy-five percent car that goes in between because you’ll still take a good bit of pleasure from that one, and you’ll have something to look forward to that you know is within your control, and you’re not then looking for the overclocked hundred and fifty percent dream car.

I mean, then you’re buying yachts, and you’re buying boats and all this other stuff. So I think—and I said this to Dan, somebody who, you know, winning poker games and stuff is large influxes of cash, kind of out of nowhere, and he seemed to agree that it expedites your ability to just play the hedonic adaptation game, but it overclocks the pace at which you have access to it, and it’s dangerous.

So, yes, slow success strategy as a counter to the gap in the game sort of game that we play with each other in this whole hedonic adaptation thing.

GEORGE MACK: It’s one of those things, though, of theory versus reality. Like, can you actually slow yourself down once that dopamine kicks in? That takes a lot of wisdom.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It takes a hell of a lot of restraint. I don’t know. And, like, what are you going to do? Like, say, “Oh, no. I don’t want that billion dollars from the lottery, please, sir.” But, you know, even with that, okay. Can I get someone to set up some sort of fund or trust that drip feeds this to me or invests it in a particular way?

I don’t know. Just trying to place your self-worth in different ways, different locations. But the gap in the game is one of the most important ideas that I keep forgetting about. It’s like a Ben Hardy book from three years ago, and he came on the show to talk about it. It’s really great.

And every time that I find myself getting too deep into dopamine, Chris—we should talk about that. We should talk about the difference between dopamine George and serotonin George, and then also probably cortisol George as well.

But we both feel this, and I think a lot of people do that you just live in this sort of next task, next achievement, overclocked hustle grind culture. I will get my pleasure from my accomplishments as opposed to the one that actually ends up being more fulfilling, which is I spend time with my friends lying in the park under a tree, eating some snack that somebody brought along or something like that. That’s the more serotonin side of things.

GEORGE MACK: I think the gap in the game is just a better meme for abundance and scarcity mindset. Abundance and scarcity kind of got hijacked a little bit by a lot of woo-woo.

The Gap and the Gain

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Whereas the beautiful thing about the gap and the gain, so you always have three things. Right? You have who you are now, this future idealized projected version where you’re trillionaire and everything’s going well and everybody loves you, like, that gap, no matter again, no matter how much you move up just grows. It’s infinite versus you have a third state, which is where you started. So the gain is measuring yourself constantly from where you started, and the gap is measuring yourself to this infinite ideal.

But the beauty to be honest with you, think it’s a nice concept. Right? But that’s one of those it’s the forgetting paradox. You can learn that and it disappears two years from now.

GEORGE MACK: Mhmm.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But going back to, like, resting serious face or resting smile face, the beautiful thing about the gap of the gain is you can only exist in one of the two states at once. That’s what I loved about that concept is you’re either in the gap or you’re in the gain. So just constantly throughout the day it’s either resting serious face or resting smile face. Yeah.

GEORGE MACK: Yeah. So it’s a simple raise, though. It’s midwittable. Which is beautiful.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What do you think is the most useful emotional state?

The Most Useful Emotional State

GEORGE MACK: Oh, yeah. So this is a niche thought experiment, but I’ll give it to the audience. So the inspiration for this thought experiment was you ever heard that kind of bro bar debate of you have the world’s best athletes across every hundred top sports. Which one is the technical best athlete in the sense that you take a basketball player, footballer, NFL, MMA, and they’d all do the other ninety-nine sports. Who would rank the highest?

And there’s big, like, bro debate about it. It’s great. And, I was like, okay. That’s an interesting idea. And I realized I’d lay there in bed.

And, Tony Robbins just, cut in on the left leg, and then this thought pops in my head. I’m like, what would be the if you applied that for emotions, what would be the most useful emotional state? So you create this Olympics of, like, happiness, sang, sadness, anger, joy, fear, envy, etcetera, etcetera. And then you looked at a hundred different life events you could be in. Doing a podcast with you, going for a bike ride.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yep.

GEORGE MACK: Getting a Starbucks, getting fired from my job.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What’s the outcome that you’re optimizing for here? Most useful. What’s useful?

GEORGE MACK: Probably achieving the outcome that you would would have liked upon reflection.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay. Is the way I’d probably describe that. But I’d probably need to think about that more. But let’s say you have all those situations from married to funeral to losing job to first day at job, and you had looked to all the different emotions you could have, like which one would perform the best on average. And I realized, I go, probably calmness.

If you could like, it’s not even like the sports debate where it’s up for debate. I think calmness just is top for pretty much them all, or if not, it’s in the Champions League places. It’s in that, like, top four. And just but then I was like, okay. Let’s steel mine myself here.

I wasn’t sleeping that night. So I was like, okay. Well, let’s say, for example, there’s a fire breaks down the building. Would you want to be calm? Would be the criticism of it.

And it’s like, well, you don’t want to be slothful. You wouldn’t want to be lazy, but you’d probably want to be calm. I assume I’m not a fireman. We have bullshit jobs. Right?

Like, we don’t do serious jobs, but when you chat to people who have proper jobs, the best guys are the ones that are calm under pressure. So I think it kills that. And then the second criticism if you was to steel man it as well would be, well, let’s say it’s your that may work for neutral events or toxic events or things where it has to go well. But let’s say it’s your wedding day. Do you want to be calm?

I was like, that’s probably a good criticism. But then I was thinking about it. And whenever you speak to people about the wedding day, they always say, it was great, but I just wish I soaked it in more. I wish I could slow down time a bit more. And I don’t think anything slows down time quite like calmness.

And for any criticism you do have where you wouldn’t want to be calm, the beautiful thing about calmness is you can calmness is such a base state that you can then ramp up any emotion on top of, but you can’t do the reverse. It’s really hard to go from anger to, like, peak calmness. So I just looked at it and go, that wins the debate, and then I fell to sleep that night. Calmly.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Calmly. Douglas asked me yesterday what, like, I aim for in life.

GEORGE MACK: Mhmm.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And I used the word peace, which sounds so cooked, like, in retrospect.

It just sounds so lame, especially when I’m talking to this, you know, like, firebrand cultural commentator guy, like, says things that people don’t like and all the rest of it. But it is true that, like, if the price is your sanity, you shouldn’t pay it. For pretty much whatever it is. There’s almost nothing that’s worth that because, ultimately, without your sanity, you can’t enjoy any of the things that you’re going to get from it in any case. And I think that largely calmness and peace could probably be interchangeable here.

But to critique us here, what I would say as a listener is like, yeah, that’s nice. And I might forget that as part of the forgetting paradox, but, like, what does that do? It’s like, well, how do I become calm? And the answer is I haven’t fully figured that out yet, but I guess the first step is realizing that it’s probably the most useful. The most something to aim for and, again, using the hidden and observable metrics matrix. Like, it’s one of the most hidden metrics.

GEORGE MACK: Yeah. Like, the texture of your own mind. I will happily work a job with a boss that’s a dick that pays more money, that makes me feel miserable, that causes me to be anxious before I go into work because I can’t see the price that I’m paying in terms of my lack of peace or calmness. Right? But I can see the increase in my bank balance every month.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Mhmm. Right? Just trading it in, trading in that hidden metric for an observable one. You’re seeing that with glucose monitors in the sense that people would just eat whatever.

GEORGE MACK: Yeah. And now they have that orange juice and then video game dashboard go terrible that they can begin to piece that together. We unfortunately don’t – I’m just going back to resting smile face. If there was a way of tracking that throughout the day and you could turn it into a video game of where your facial expressions were sat, I think you’d have a lot happier people. It’s weird.

The Meditation Paradox

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. What was that you told me and you described it really beautifully, it was the first time that anyone had described the same psychosis that I go through when I’m meditating about, I’m the sort of person that has thoughts about thoughts.

GEORGE MACK: Oh, yeah. We were chatting about this over dinner where it’s this infinite loop that can exist when you’re observing your own mind, and you get to a state of no thoughts. And then after you’ve dealt with all the Tony Robbins thoughts, what comes up is, oh, look at me having no thoughts.

I’m great. And then you end up in that…

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, yeah, because you…

GEORGE MACK: It’s a Trojan thought. Yeah. You think, oh, wow. I’m the sort of narcissist that thinks, wow. Look at me, the sort of person that has no thoughts. And then you think, oh my god. I’m so self-deprecating. I’m the sort of person that mocks me for being the sort of person that thinks, wow. I’m the sort of person.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh my god. And then you just…

GEORGE MACK: Cycle of doom. So funny, man. So funny. What else you got?

High Agency Examples

GEORGE MACK: We always have chats about high agency, and, again, that’s a powerful meme right now. But I’ve been collecting examples. One of them that came from mutual friend David Senra. Have heard about James Cameron? I thought this is one of craziest stories ever.

Again, talk about memes or ideas. So you know James Cameron, the movie director? So he was a truck driver when he was eighteen, and he couldn’t afford to go to movie education. What do you call it?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Film school.

GEORGE MACK: Film school. And he decided, I can’t afford it. I mean, the low agency thing is like, okay. It’s that reality. Blah blah blah.

And I was like, this guy is so good that he came up with the idea of going to the library, and everybody who could afford the film degree, when they’re handing in their dissertations or their work, they put it in the library that night. He would just go there, take the pieces late at night, put them in the photocopying machine, photocopy, photocopy, photocopy, and taught himself his whole film degree from scratch because he couldn’t afford it. Was like, that is elite story. So good.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Wow. That is cool. There’s another one we spoke about a while ago in the high agency library, I told you about the guy that took down Silk Road. So Silk Road was the biggest black market illegal drugs empire.

GEORGE MACK: Mhmm.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The FBI were after him. The CIA were after him. The DEA were after him. This guy called Dread Pirate Roberts who turned out to be Ross Ulbricht. And there’s a lot about that case that gets super political, and I don’t want to have that conversation because I’m not educated on it. But the specific part that I found fascinating was the way he got caught.

So the FBI with all their resources, best intel, best spyware in the world couldn’t catch him. It was this one tax inspector who started working on the case, and this guy just thinks, okay. I’ll go on Google and just searches. He goes, what about if I just find the first original post about Silk Road online? And he finds it in this Bitcoin forum.

And what the Dread Pirate Roberts did, obviously, when you’re at that zero to one stage of a new company, even if it’s an illegal drug market empire, you need to get people in.

GEORGE MACK: Mhmm.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So you create an account, like, going, oh my god. Have people seen this? And he’s like, this is the earliest post that exists online.

And he reached out to the forum owners. It was like, essentially reverse engineered this Altoid handle, what the email address was, and it was Ross Ulbricht at Gmail dot com. And he was the first guy to unmask. And I love that story because it’s like, one guy with Google has beat the FBI, the CIA, the DEA, achieving essentially the most wanted man in America at the time. That’s, like, similar to James Cameron. Right? Like, a guy with essentially no resources…

GEORGE MACK: Yep.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That can massively overperform.

Guy Ritchie’s Product Placement

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Have you speaking of movies, there’s a new Guy Ritchie film out that’s an oddly, very similar plot to the gentleman, but is different. I can’t remember what it’s called.

It’s on Amazon Prime. Everyone should go and watch it. Guy Ritchie’s. The guy’s brilliant. But if you’ve seen it turns out Douglas is friends with him.

And, you know that he has created his own, like, hut slash barbecue slash foot warmer thing. Do you know about this?

GEORGE MACK: No.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Right. So in the gentleman, if you see, Hugh Grant toward the end when he’s confronting Charlie Hunan, and trying to screw him over, they’re outside, and they’re kind of sat under this, like, kind of a nice sort of indoor outdoor looking shed type thing, and there’s like a fire and a big smoke.

Turns out that Guy Ritchie invented that. Like, it’s his product. Right? This is the ultimate product placement that he’s put in, and I think they talk about one of the features that he has in the gentleman. And then in this most recent one, again, it’s Hugh Grant playing a very similar sort of role.

This time, he’s like a rich billionaire, like, super dick guy. And, he’s, like, cuts to this scene, and he’s explaining how he’s, like, reverse searing a stake on Guy Ritchie’s…

GEORGE MACK: Wow.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Custom designed thing, which you can go and buy. It’s super expensive, I think, but you can go and buy it on the Internet. Search a Guy Ritchie barbecue, and I’m sure it’ll come up.

And, yeah, he just he just got this product that he’s created. I’m pretty sure when he went on Rogan that he talked about it. But, yeah, he’s just got this product that he created that is now featuring in multimillion dollar blockbuster movies and directed by this great guy. But, yeah, ultimately, it’s just, like, I guess, part of the funnel for his…

GEORGE MACK: Super meme officer. Chief meme officer.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. He’s super expensive barbecue. What have we got coming up next? What’s the next few months got in store for you?

GEORGE MACK: A few different things. I’ve got a few essays I want to publish, a few different ideas I’m working on. But, yeah, just I don’t actually know how to answer that question. Just enjoying it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Good. Where should people go? Do you want to keep up to date with your reading, your writing, and all the rest of the stuff?

GEORGE MACK: Yeah. So best place is Twitter or X. Just george_mack. Sign up to the newsletter list as well at georgemac.com or george-mac.com. Some bastards got the thing without the dash. Yeah. You can find it all there.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, George. I appreciate you.

GEORGE MACK: Thank you, man.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode with George, you will love my full length two hour long podcast episode with Douglas Murray. Go on. Give it a watch.

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