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Hi, I'm Jim O'Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops.
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Sometimes we get caught up in what feel like infinite loops when trying to figure things out.
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Markets go up and down, research is presented and then refuted, and we find ourselves right back where we started.
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The goal of this podcast is to learn how we can reset our thinking on issues that hopefully leaves us with a better understanding as to why we think the way we think and how we might be able to change that to avoid going in infinite loops of thought.
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We hope to offer our listeners a fresh perspective on a variety of issues and look at them through a multifaceted lens — including history, philosophy, art, science, linguistics, and yes, also through quantitative analysis.
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And through these discussions help you not only become a better investor, but also become a more nuanced thinker.
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With each episode we hope to bring you along with us as we learn together.
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Thanks for joining us, now please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops.
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Disclaimer: Jim O'Shaughnessy is chairman and Co-Chief Investment Officer of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, where Jamie Catherwood is an associate.
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All opinions expressed by Jim, Jamie and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
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This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
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Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, hello, everyone.
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It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with another episode of Infinite Loops.
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I am so excited today, and I'm so happy that we have no time limit on the length of this podcast because I get to be self-indulgent and talk to people that I find absolutely fascinating.
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And I can tell you that I find today's guest, George Mack, incredibly fascinating.
2:47
From his viral threads on Twitter to his agency for digital marketing, which is at Multiply, he is a king of mental models, something that if you listen to me occasionally, you'll know that I sometimes mention. George, welcome.
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George Mack: Thank you for having me, Jim.
3:14
I'm looking forward to it.
3:14
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So, so the first thing as I was going through all the stuff, one of the things that caught me about the way you do things is apply specific knowledge, and then make that it always include tech.
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Tell me about that little formula, specific knowledge, technology equals virality.
3:42
George Mack: It's a great question.
3:42
So breaking down the two things, specific knowledge, obviously I think it's one of navalisms of where that's kind of originated from and what that actually means, versus sometimes it's easier to understand the meaning of it when you compare it against the opposite, right?
3:55
So like general knowledge of by definition, it's hyper general specific knowledge.
3:59
It's one of those things, it's very hard to describe, but you know it when you see it.
4:05
Like an extremely charismatic guest host or somebody who can put together an Excel spreadsheet better than anybody you know, it's a very specific thing.
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And by definition is quite hard to teach and only can be learned.
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And then combining that with technology, or I guess, technology itself is kind of a form of specific knowledge.
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One of the things I think I was drawn to technology was as an impatient young person, how can you accelerate your career?
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And for me, the traditional career market kind, I always say it kind of operates like a nightclub market, where if you want to get in, you've got to queue up and wait a long time.
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But technology is kind of that back door that gets you in faster.
4:53
So what I mean by that is, everything in life, you kind of go to your parents for advice, assuming you've got relatively decent parents, like I was fortunate to have.
5:00
But the only time they come to you for advice, when you're like 10 years old is technology, whether it's the remote control for the TV, right?
5:08
But most young people haven't put two and two together that there's such a career advantage of going into technology.
5:12
So within technology, there's various facets of specific knowledge, whether that's knowing how to create smart contracts and solidity, to how to scale TikTok ads for very specific intricate details within that.
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But I've always felt that that combination is incredibly powerful, particularly for younger people, because they're more native to it. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
5:33
The you know it when you see it reminds me of the Supreme Court Justice when they were trying to decide a pornography case and that's what he said.
5:39
He says, I can't define pornography, but I know it when I see it, which I found very funny.
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And also, I loved the tech is the one thing that your parents ask you about.
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I mean, I have been there so many times.
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Even though I was an early adopter in tech for all of my life really.
6:00
And it reminded me of the Douglas Adams quote where he says that any technology that was in the world when you were born is absolutely normal.
6:08
It's the way the world should be.
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He goes any technology that came on the scene between ages 15 and 35, very exciting, very revolutionary.
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Maybe you could get a career in it, but he adds, any technology that comes in after your age 35 is against the normal order of things. Do you find that?
6:35
George Mack: A hundred percent.
6:36
The best example of this recently, that's more of a very obvious example that people know about is TikTok, right?
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And if we take away maybe the political controversies around TikTok for a second, just look at it purely as a social network.
6:47
You see this exact thing where there's loads of young people using it, and it immediately started just seen as this teenage girl, lip syncing, dancing app.
6:57
And then you saw the reach of it as it acquired users.
6:57
But then there's this weird arbitrage that exists that commercial directors, marketing directors still, because they tend to be older, haven't taken advantage of it.
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And he meant there's this huge arbitrage that exists with a platform like TikTok now where the reach to effort ratio is humongous, regardless of your opinion on the platform, it's true versus other platforms where people are now who grew up, millennials who grew up a bit, it's kind of diluted away.
7:27
So you see that often as well.
7:27
And the thing I'm fascinated by, and probably throw this question back to you, I have a genuine fear as I get older that I'll lose this curiosity, because I've seen that happen to people.
7:39
And I always think about Gary Vaynerchuk, Mark Cuban as two rare individuals that seem to still have it.
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And I'm fascinated by what that is.
7:46
And I don't quite know if it's something natural, something nurture that keeps that curiosity as you age to still have that 18 year old's mindset.
7:57
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So, in my case, the answer's pretty simple, and that is I've been blessed all of my life with being voraciously curious about everything. Not just tech.
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So I especially loved technology as a young man.
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So I started keeping journals at about age 18, and I was rereading one that I wrote when I was 21, and the whole first part of it was the effects that technology were going to have on our future.
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And I was pretty pleased that I got a lot of them right.
8:30
But I joined before the internet, right?
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There was paid services, essentially chat rooms, and one that was sort of ubiquitous was called CompuServe.
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And the whole thing back then, talk about nerd alert, was what was your number, right?
8:52
So, they had a general identifier that as the first part of their number, but then they had a comma and there were two, three, four, five, six, whatever numbers beyond it.
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Well, what it was was if you had two numbers, you were one of the first 100 users.
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And so, literally people when I was chatting with them, they'd say, whoa, man, you've been here a long time. Give me some tips.
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So, I think that technology, listen, we're doing a series called The Great Reshuffle, and my friend, Matt Clifford, came up with the term that I've stolen from him, which is the internet is the world's largest variance amplifier in history.
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But what you see are these massive, massive changes, some of which are incredibly good for people with certain skill sets, others unfortunately are going to be affected negatively.
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And your point about parents, and people who lose that curiosity about all things technology or all things new, in fact.
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But yeah, so I think it's sort of an innate curiosity and I don't know that it has to be age limited.
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It tends to be, it seems to be.
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But I was thinking about something that was going to be the next thing I wanted your kind of take on.
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I'm reading this great book by Bill Bryson about America in 1927, and I was absolutely fascinated by all the shit I did not know.
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I pride myself on like knowing history pretty well, like 1066, I can tell you, Battle of Hastings.
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But I'm reading this book and I'm like, I can't believe this, and the point I thought would be really interesting for our conversation was he notes that when Lindberg, right, flew the Atlantic. First guy to do it.
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I had no idea what a big deal that was. It was massive.
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It was just a massive deal.
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But the thing that that caught my eye was that when he came back to the United States, NBC broadcast the first national radio program doing a play by play.
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But that was in 1927, wasn't even a hundred years ago.
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And so, I'm talking to my wife who always usually gives me the Heisman, because when I get excited about something, I want to talk about it.
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But this is the curve, right? Boom.
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It is straight up exponentially, because we're all carrying super computers in our pockets now.
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So what are your thoughts about how quickly will technology morph that gives us even better or more useful tools. You mentioned TikTok. Like TikTok is cool.
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I agree with you in terms of forget the politics, forget all of that.
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It's like the old Sam Kennison joke, he was a really funny comic.
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And he was talking about bringing food to people who were starving in the desert.
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And he was noted for his delivery of being really slow at first, like, yes, so I would notice that we keep bringing the food to the people out in the desert.
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And so, why don't we just say move to where the food is?
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How are we going to move to where the food is in tech?
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George Mack: It's a great question.
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There's so much to unpack here.
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So, I mean, going back to the curiosity stuff as well, what even is technology?
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Even before we get in the conversation of how we're going to move the needle, what is technology?
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I think that's a huge issue where people immediately put off is, I think, for again, making this number up, but I put a bit of money behind it, 80% of people, if you ask them what technology is, they essentially assume it's code of some sort. But really what is it?
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It's just tool building is probably the way I'd define it.
13:04
Going back to specific knowledge earlier, ie me saying the word me was probably once a technology.
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You could argue language could be the original technology.
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So you've got that side of things that you first have to, okay, understand, get out the box of just code.
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The fascinating thing is then you go down like the whole Peter Thiel rabbit hole, and it's why has code, and software, and bits accelerated so much, but then the rest of the physical world hasn't.
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I was in Amsterdam, Vondelpark Park the other day and it's an amazing site when you get there and you see the planes go over.
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And I was just starstruck, because I know like cabin crew and people who work on planes and it's just, it's so safe now.
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And I was thinking, I was having this discussion, let's say we had all the knowledge we had now, but planes weren't a thing.
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And we launched, like me and Jim started, we're the new Wright brothers.
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We come up with the idea and we tried to launch it.
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Realistically we have a 50% failure rate, we'd be shut down immediately, probably in the 30 year prison sentence, et cetera.
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So then there's a fascinating question of, are we accelerating as fast as we can?
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And how do you prevent risk to reward, or deal with that ratio?
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In terms of how things are accelerating, I think there's a very good, I was listening to a podcast, I've forgotten the exact thing where it's like, how fast it's accelerating.
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It's like, technology's like a coin flip.
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On one side is we live forever, on the other side is human extinction and we're going to see which way it goes, because it's compounding like crazy, but it feels like we haven't quite accelerated in certain industries.
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But also, I do wonder with the rise of remote work and people spreading around and maybe certain government bodies of the US that dictates the world, opening that up, what impact that may have of the US not being the governing body, and you can run these AB tests in other countries that we wouldn't, ie planes today.
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We wouldn't probably be able to do in the US, but you know what?
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This country over here might, et cetera, et cetera. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
15:15
You might actually love the book because that is also a theme of the book and he writes about how a foreigner coming to the United States in 1927 would be gobsmacked, because it was the first vertical city.
15:25
We made 85% of the movies that were distributed worldwide.
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We had half the world's known gold reserve back under that Barber relic of a currency system.
15:42
And the other thing that was absolutely underlining your point, was there were no fucking rules in the US.
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There were no aviation rules. There were no runways.
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And this guy came up with a prize for the first person who could fly across the Atlantic, right?
16:07
And there were all these various teams, some were super well financed, Lindberg horribly financed, but literally, I mean, and he really weaves it in and it's one of the themes.
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Like for example, there were more pedestrians killed in New York City in that one year, 1927, than we see on an annual basis today. Right?
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So America was like, you want to try something risky? Come here, man.
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You can do whatever you want to do.
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And I honestly sort of passionately believed that was one of the reasons why America became America.
16:43
And there's another pretty interesting thesis, which is, what is America made up of?
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Well, it's made up of people who are very unique in one specific way. They were risk seekers.
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When you think about it, it's like well, what do you mean?
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Well, how many other people jumped on a boat?
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Maybe sometimes just with the clothes on their back and came to a completely, another country where they had no family, no friends, no nothing.
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And what drew them here was what they saw when they came in 1927.
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Vertical cities, more cars than the rest of the world combined.
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Appliances that were looked at like magic.
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And so, I think that your observation is really a good one.
17:32
It applies to everything, right? George Mack: Yes.
17:43
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Like they built the Empire State Building in a little over a year, right?
17:45
The environmental impact statement would take 10 years now.
17:45
And if you want an example, look at Millennium Tower after 9/11, right?
17:56
They wanted to build Millennial Tower and have the memorial there, which is lovely.
18:04
If you're ever in New York, I'll hook you up and you'll walk through it, and see it, and love it.
18:09
But it took like over 10 years, not because we didn't have the capability to do it, it was because we have become even America, and I think in many parts, Europe is worse, just regulatory monsters.
18:22
And the whole idea of safety, I think, is at the core.
18:32
I think, look, human operating system is basically emotional.
18:32
It's run by your emotions.
18:38
And we pile on rational reasons for our behavior, but they start with emotions.
18:46
And I think the governing emotion is fear. And am I safe? Right?
18:46
And so, once you had all of those crazy guys in the planes, 50% death rates.
18:54
People still did it, man.
19:01
And I have another friend who was I was making this case to him, and he's like, yeah, but if somebody invented teleportation, would you not be in that line?
19:07
And I went, guilty as charged. What do you think?
19:14
George Mack: Well, it is fascinating.
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The one thing that was popping through my head then, as you were saying that, is the parallels of the individual company and country.
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So what I mean by that is, the easiest metaphor to begin with is at a company level that you've seen that model play out of Facebook is a startup, then becomes this huge body where I've heard stories like for them to change certain colors or certain buttons, they've got to go through 50 different legal meetings, right?
19:43
Back in the move, fast and break things when Mark was with a few guys at Harvard, or girls at Harvard, that didn't exist, right?
19:49
And then you see this as things get bigger, you have this level of regulation coming at the company level, and then the startup will often come in and replace.
19:59
And then we went back earlier about, at the individual level of how before a certain age, you're more curious.
20:05
And as a result, you can take more risks.
20:05
And as you get older, obviously it's not a perfect metaphor, but you can see how it's a similar pattern there.
20:10
And then you see it at the country level as well, where you have the America, the rise and the fall of every empire.
20:19
The fascinating thing for me is the question of, it seems like you're facing entropy as you get older, both as an individual, a company, and as a country, and/or particularly with success, it seems to be the case.
20:34
And then it's just about maybe trying to think about what are the things that seem to delay it.
20:39
I think that the beautiful thing the United States has is you've got multiple states and you've got that going on, which the UK doesn't have.
20:43
So yeah, it's a real interesting thing of when you become the heavyweight champion of the world, how do you maintain being the heavyweight champion of the world?
20:54
It's when everybody else wants to be the heavyweight champion of the world and the advantage they've got on their side is they're often hungrier, and like the heavyweight champion of the world, or the biggest company in the world, or the best country in the world, you don't have to do the press conferences, the media obligations, everything that comes with it.
21:10
Whereas at different levels, it's different forms of entropy, and different forms of risk prevention.
21:15
But you see it, everything, from the individual to the company, to the country, to the athlete. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. I agree.
21:21
And entropy and stasis are the enemies.
21:21
And how do you overcome them?
21:21
In my case, I love young people, and I hire young people, and I don't care where they live, which will lead us into talking a bit about remote work.
21:35
And several of my colleagues here at Infinite Loops, I've never met in real life.
21:42
I basically watch them on social media and Twitter is my platform of choice, because I think that it still, despite all their fuckups, it still has the ability to emerge as the world's first global intelligence network, in my opinion. Just my industry.
22:02
Used to be, I was talking to what they call a gatekeeper.
22:02
They're the ones who say whether you can get into an asset management search or not.
22:07
And he was remarking to me, he said, I still remember, like seven or however many years ago, that you said to me, because he had told me then, if you're on Twitter, you will not be considered. It's reversed now. George Mack: Wow.
22:26
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It's now reversed.
22:26
If you are not on Twitter. Nope.
22:31
Because it is now shorthand for a place where you can get incredible amounts of information very, very quickly and undiluted.
22:38
Like your idea about technology, by the way. I totally agree.
22:43
I think language probably was the first technology, and then writing.
22:48
That was a massive upgrade.
22:48
But the first writing was by accountants. It wasn't by poets.
22:56
And writing developed so that they could keep track of all the trades that were being made.
23:02
Because back in those days, I sail across the ocean to you, and I say, okay, George here, I'm going to give you this number of barrel of wines.
23:09
And you're going to give me a hundred sheep.
23:14
Well, a year later when we're making that transaction, I'm like, no, no.
23:14
I said, 25 barrels of wine and you were going to give me two hundred sheep.
23:22
And like, well, it often ended in death, because they would kill one another.
23:30
So, they started to do cuneiform and other very early forms of writing.
23:38
So I do love your idea that tech is, I would look at it this way, that kind of tech is anything that extends our human reach or improves our ability to be explainers and connectors.
23:55
And like writing, like Robert Anton Wilson, an author who I love and was 60 years ahead of his time.
24:03
He said writing possibly was one of the biggest impacts up till that point in human history, because it allowed us to time bind our ideas and push them forward in time.
24:18
And if you're going to want to have all of this innovation that we've been seeing, you got to have access to those old ideas, right?
24:26
And so, I think that your thing about the people and companies is well said though, because I do think that there are ways that you can fight it, right?
24:41
You can hire a bunch of young people, and you can let them do what they're good at.
24:45
I'm just, I'm amazed by people who are digital natives.
24:52
Like my youngest daughter, I've never seen somebody be able to text somebody so fast in my entire life.
24:58
Because haptic memory is a thing, right? George Mack: Yes.
25:06
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I was talking to a crypto guy, and he was trying to give me the standard sale on crypto.
25:08
And I'm like, if I were you, I would focus on the fact that people are not young people are not using actual cash anymore.
25:21
And so, that gives you a kid aesthetic knowledge, right?
25:21
So when somebody my age, I'm 62, does this, it means money. Okay?
25:25
And it means money because you have a haptic memory of the bills in your pocket.
25:33
I wouldn't doubt it if my great grandchildren do this when they mean money.
25:39
George Mack: That's a great point.
25:40
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right? George Mack: Yeah.
25:40
I literally, sorry, I was going to say we had this literally at dinner the other night where we still do this for the bill.
25:47
So I'm using that as if we're going to sign it with a pen and we're going, I've not signed a bill in my whole life, but it still managed to have passed on in that regard. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. And it does.
25:57
But that's another point that you make that I want to explore more with you is this idea of go to where the network is, a bit like the Kennison joke I made, right?
26:09
And you pointed out that if you get on a six hour flight, you can be six years ahead in terms of the technology.
26:17
I want to ask that specifically, did you write that before or after the lockdown because of COVID? George Mack: After.
26:25
I think there's lots to unpack here.
26:25
So COVID has just significantly accelerated the social acceptance.
26:31
It hasn't actually really changed that much from a technological perspective, really.
26:40
But it's accelerated the social acceptance of the ability to move places.
26:40
One of the mental models, probably one of the original ones that got me deep into space, is this kind of concept of high agency or locus of control.
26:54
And I genuinely think one of the best high agency filters I have is are they an immigrant of some sort, have they moved away from their hometown?
27:01
And you may have the Alchemist story where you go around the world and you realize the best place for you is at home, but at least you've then gone through that journey of figuring that out.
27:10
And I think, as even more so now, because the barriers of friction have been reduced more and more, and it then ties into what we were talking about earlier, where you've got the countries trying to, like the US, for example, will it still maintain its dominance versus other countries that happen.
27:32
And the rise of remote work gives this ability for countries to compete or cities to compete.
27:37
And I don't think governments have priced that in at all yet.
27:37
I don't think the mainstream media has priced that in at all yet.
27:43
I always have this thing that stuck with me during COVID when everyone was remote working.
27:47
And it's this idea that remote work is the best thing to ever happen to skilled people in the developing world.
27:54
And it may be the worst thing to ever happen to skill-less people in the developed world.
27:59
And in the same way contraception and birth control did quite a lot for women's rights, maybe more so than any kind of charitable donation, it was technology that brought that about.
28:13
I wouldn't be surprised if we see feats achieved by remote work in Africa, in developing countries, or massively from just capital flowing into those places.
28:27
Because you've got like Nigeria, for example, where I think it's 50% of the population's under 18.
28:32
So going back to the technological savviness earlier, that generation over there is going to be so much savvier than such an aging country, like the UK.
28:37
And then you kind of have time zone matchups and how each individual country's going to time zone matchup.
28:47
So I do think that's going to come a bigger and bigger thing.
28:47
And it's going to be fascinating to know how you can govern that when you can kind of have immigration into your country, not via a bow or a border, it's via a wifi connection.
28:58
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Great point.
29:02
And it is it underlines the point that I have been making for a while here.
29:02
And that is the people in developed countries who really are not terribly skilled, have no idea what is coming for them.
29:17
Because with this idea of remote work that just put a billion people online, a billion really, really talented people online. George Mack: Hungry.
29:30
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And hungry, yes.
29:31
All of the attributes that you would look for, right?
29:31
If you could find them in your own backyard, you'd probably pick that preference, right?
29:37
But if you can't, you now have like, so for example, back to Infinite Loops, this podcast, I only have one colleague here that resides in the United States.
29:51
Everyone else is in India or Romania.
29:51
And we're looking at people in other, we're looking at some people in Africa, for example.
29:57
And the points that you tick off are absolutely correct, hungry, smart, young.
30:03
And like that's part, we get back to that, the nation, as it itself gets older, right?
30:13
If you get fat and happy, you don't want people throwing buckets of ice water in your face every morning.
30:19
But as one of my thesis on this is that's exactly what's going to happen because time and space have collapsed.
30:25
We literally, if there is a very, very highly skilled person who happens to be in Nairobi, so be it, they're in Nairobi.
30:39
And I just think that that is going to be a big deal over the next 20 years.
30:47
Because again, you talk about big companies, right?
30:47
So, big companies have, I would guess at least 40% of the people in a big company are there just as viscosity to slow things down, right?
31:05
Because big companies don't really want things going super fast.
31:05
They want to protect the status quo.
31:11
They want to protect the way they used to do things, all of those things.
31:16
And so this unproductive, ineffective group that are, have you ever seen the movie Office Space where- George Mack: No.
31:26
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, you should watch it. You'd love it.
31:26
So, they bring in consultants because they're too cowardly to fire the people themselves.
31:33
And so the consultants are like asking questions and he's asking of one of these guys who does nothing really, "What would you say you do here?"
31:46
And he's like, and he just explodes, "I'm a people person.
31:46
I can talk to the techs and then I can talk to the salesman and I can show them how it works," right?
31:53
And that was talk about a prescient call on the way things are going to work.
32:00
I personally think that I'll still be alive when the world's first multi-billion dollar corporation is owned by and has only one employee.
32:14
And I think that is that kind of cultural evolution with the internet.
32:14
Like that's a potent and really interesting brew.
32:22
It's got a lot of downsides, which we are going to cover in the thing, but the upsides for talented people are ridiculous. It's just crazy. Would you consider that? George Mack: Yeah.
32:39
You can take it further as well.
32:39
I'd say you're going to have potentially the first teenage, maybe younger, self-made billionaire in the next few decades.
32:45
Because, right now the frictions for young people to get started and you've got to attend high school, but then again, if you look at homeschooling that's on the rise massively.
32:56
Again, talking about a point that I think people thought was very, very weird and bizarre.
33:02
You can slowly see it becoming more and more accepted.
33:06
And I think the model of it will change over time and there'll be different models that exist, but you're seeing that rising.
33:11
So you factor in that you're going to have young people with a lot more free time. The internet connection.
33:15
You've got companies Stripe making it easier to start a business.
33:20
And I'm sure there'll be ways of being able to register as a business as a 10 year old or a 14 year old or a 16 year old, whatever it is.
33:28
There's even an example right now, I forgot the kid's name. He's called like Ryan.
33:28
And he has a toy YouTube channel.
33:32
And his parents obviously helping with the business, but it's turning over hundreds of millions in toys, right?
33:37
So you can easily imagine, like you have Vitalik, who created Ethereum as a teenager essentially.
33:42
You can so easily assume not only you going to have people from the developing world coming into the economy, you're going to have 11 year old TikTok'er who has 12 million followers and has got her own DTC range, et cetera.
33:52
Or, a programmer who's 15, but he's been coding since he was seven.
33:58
So I think that's another factor as well.
34:03
You're going to see young people come in.
34:03
Because, there's this kind of thing about child labor, it's been good for a lot of history that we've stopped that thing.
34:08
But when labor becomes more creative, more joyful, and the school systems deteriorate more and more, could you actually argue it's better for them to be tinkering around on GitHub building smart contracts that pay people and they get paid, versus sitting in a classroom asking to go to the toilet and studying a textbook that hasn't evolved in 50 years?
34:28
I think that's going to happen as well.
34:33
So not only are you going to see the developing nations come online, you're going to see younger and younger people come online.
34:37
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, I agree completely.
34:39
And that's kind of the scary part, if you will, of this.
34:39
Essentially what's happening in my opinion is all of the old institutions are devolving. They're all collapsing.
34:54
And they're collapsing because they want to cling desperately to those old ways of doing things.
35:02
And Synthesis School is a great example.
35:02
It teaches in a completely different manner. It's online.
35:09
It gamifies, so the kids really want to do it.
35:09
Like literally as I was looking into it, there are parents who have to like physically remove their children from learning.
35:21
And so most people don't know that like in the United States, at least, this idea of like eight hours in a room, that came about during the industrial era.
35:30
And the industrialist said to the people doing the schools, "We want people to get used to being spending eight hours in a room doing nothing."
35:41
And some of the more radical ideas about education is that it's not education at all.
35:51
It's attempting to make them conform to the prevailing societal system.
36:00
And I think that like, if you're going to debate an Oxford style or Oxford style debate about it, that's going to win because like the whole notion of what learning is, has changed dramatically.
36:08
I'm involved in several of those things, just because I think that I'm very excited by teaching children how to think rather than what to think.
36:24
And the idea of the world that we're moving into is one where creativity really, for the first time is going to be like one of the top attributes.
36:40
That, and your ability to synthesize things.
36:45
Because like, when I was a kid, I have a really good memory, right?
36:45
So, "Oh, he's really smart."
36:50
Well, it was because basically I had a good memory, right?
36:50
Nowadays Google man, you can offload all of those things that are eating your neural space right now.
36:57
And what you want to get good at is synthesizing ideas.
37:04
Which leads me to an another question of something you've said, and I really liked it.
37:10
You said, rather, word of mouth.
37:10
You don't just think about it, about word of mouth.
37:16
Think about it as word of network, if you will.
37:16
How are people going to be talking about what you're presenting and where are they going to be talking about it?
37:23
Talk to me a little bit about that. George Mack: Yeah.
37:29
A growth marketer by trade.
37:29
I've got a point I'll make about the education system.
37:29
How I think you can fix that with marketing in a second.
37:35
And so we look after, back at Social Change, which is a big growth agency at tech innovation side of things there.
37:40
And now kind of scale a lot of, got about 10 YC companies we look after.
37:44
Very like high scaling companies.
37:44
And constantly looking at things from a problem of you have a company or an idea, and you're looking for it to spread, right?
37:58
And again, we talked about technology earlier and what is actually technology if you define the word.
38:05
A good example of that is memes, right? What is a meme?
38:05
You've got the classic, what one person means or what a lot of people mean, which is kind of funny image with text or a GIF with text.
38:16
But then you can go down the whole Richard Dawkins route where a meme is something that spreads via culture in a kind of viral COVID 19 style.
38:30
It's so important to define those words.
38:30
With word of mouth, you have that that exists, but people's operating systems haven't quite updated to the modern technology.
38:35
They literally think you go to the pub, you go to the bar.
38:39
But going back to the remote work analogy earlier, you've got people who are in Romania, people in Amsterdam, people in London who are more similar to people that are next door neighbors to them, right?
38:49
So things have gone from spreading at the local pub or the local bars to spreading online.
38:54
And because actually people are finding more similar people to them online, the word of mouth spreads a lot faster.
38:57
So I call it kind of word of mouth 2.
39:01
0, which is what a friend said to me of think about how this is going to get placed when it gets put in a group chat, and kind of think about every marketing activity around that.
39:11
So like a good example would be okay, you unbundle word of mouth.
39:11
So you've all of a sudden got B2B word of mouth, which is Slack.
39:19
How is that going to be presented when it appears in Slack.
39:19
You've got B2C word of mouth, which might be iMessage if you're US or WhatsApp for the rest of the world.
39:27
You've got, I call it like word of mouth for innovators, which is probably going to like Discord or Telegram kind of niche, networking platforms or Twitter.
39:31
And it's really understanding how each individual network spreads. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
39:41
And I love that idea because as part of when I was doing my research on you, I kind of like the way that you yourself have gamified your to-do list.
39:52
Talk a little bit about that 'cause that's really intriguing to me. George Mack: Yeah.
40:01
It takes me back onto the education system point as well.
40:01
So for me, I've tried every to-do list.
40:08
I've tried Asana, Trello, I've tried Notion.
40:08
I've tried every single tool and I get that initial day high.
40:14
And then six days in I've forgotten about it.
40:14
I feel a bit dirty thinking about it. It's terrible, right?
40:19
So now I've just got a full Apple mode stack and I just turn everything into a video game.
40:24
And I actually did this when I wanted to learn how to code and learn how to program when I was playing around with that.
40:28
So I have like a little bot on Twitter.
40:34
And I went to build a bot, but I never built one before.
40:34
I've thought it'd be a fun project.
40:38
And when you have a project like that, what exists is this zero to one binary state of bots being built, bots not being built.
40:44
And even as you're making progress along here, it's that Nietzsche quote, "You stare into the abyss and the abyss stares back to you."
40:51
You feel like you're making no progress.
40:55
And what's essentially happening at that is you're trying to play a level hundred of the video game immediately and judging yourself by level a hundred, versus completely unpacking.
41:03
So I literally have a section of my Apple Notes and I start, I go level one, plan the rest of the levels.
41:07
It's always the same level one, right?
41:07
And then I write down a conscious stream of everything that needs to get done.
41:14
And then I go, I have like everything up to like level 10, broken down sometimes even have like level 2. 1, 2. 2.
41:18
Each one is like a small step.
41:23
And as soon as that's done, I've got the dopamine hit, because I'm at level two already.
41:30
And then I know each little step that I've got to take.
41:30
And I've got this momentum behind me and I'm suddenly addicted to do this system for the first time ever, because I've marketed.
41:37
It's the same thing, but I've just marketed it myself differently.
41:41
And this takes me on to the point about the education system we chatted about earlier.
41:44
And I think a fundamental problem with it is how they've marketed it to the students.
41:44
And I think this is going to change part of it again, another topic where we spoke about earlier, regulation, the inability for teachers to innovate.
41:53
I get genuinely annoyed about the amount of time that I wasted at school because teachers didn't know how to reframe the subject to me.
42:04
So for example, the same way I reframed my to-do list system into a video game, business studies for me was so boring.
42:09
You just learned terms like cash flow and P and L and opportunity cost, exactly right? Just so boring.
42:15
Whereas what you could easily do now is you go, okay, what is a trending topic amongst kids these days? Oh, okay.
42:21
Let's pick this TikTok influencer.
42:27
Let's analyze their business model.
42:27
All of a sudden that is fascinating. They're engaged.
42:31
You've taken the exact same material the same way I did with my to-do list and reframed it into a video game and made that interesting.
42:35
The best example of this is in the UK, it's called ICT information technologies.
42:38
That was the most boring subject.
42:38
I would fall asleep in it.
42:44
But in hindsight it had the potential for the most amount of valuable skill.
42:44
But if you turn that into, okay, let's build a bot that texts your friends funny jokes, all of a sudden that's so much more intriguing.
42:53
But the education system has teachers rather than marketers.
42:53
And I do think if we could literally just reframe things, not even change the material that much, the impact it would both have for our to-do list systems in the case of the video game one, and then the education system, is humongous.
43:08
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Totally agree.
43:11
I once put a tweet up that I think it went something like, "Everything begins life as a marketing campaign.
43:18
The most successful people in the world are those who have the ability to reframe things.
43:25
And we're all in the entertainment business, whether we realize it or not."
43:25
And the reframing like death insurance, zero sales, life insurance, billions in sales.
43:33
And the ability to reframe, I think, is something that people simply don't understand the power of that.
43:43
For example, you can do semantic hijacking of phrases that are very deeply, they own a lot of neural real estate, right?
43:59
And people think very highly of them.
43:59
There are many opportunities that you can just put another word in front of that other word.
44:06
And suddenly everyone's like, "Oh, this is fantastic."
44:12
And you have a piece that I loved, which is, the best marketing campaign doesn't look like a marketing campaign.
44:18
The best sales person doesn't sound like a salesperson.
44:18
Expand on that if you would. George Mack: Yeah.
44:27
I think that thought came to me when I was reading Thiel's Zero To One.
44:27
And he uses exact point where he says, the engineers always disregard sales people and marketers, because it's like, what do they do all day?
44:39
They just go for lunches and like chat around the office being charismatic.
44:44
Like what do they actually do?
44:44
And it's that, you have the engineer's brain and the salesperson's brain.
44:49
And sometimes you get both in one brain, and that's when you have a very special individual.
44:54
And the fact that, yeah, as soon as people think it's marketing, it's by definition they've kind of built up the immune system, the defense mechanisms for that.
45:04
As soon as somebody thinks it's sales, they've built up for that.
45:08
Like the best example would be Elon, depending on whatever your opinions are of him, right?
45:13
He's still the best marketer that exists because he's not a CMO.
45:20
He's not a chief marketing officer.
45:20
It's because he feels like he's actually bad at marketing, and it reduces all those defense mechanisms that you have.
45:24
Same with some of the best sales people in the world.
45:30
You wouldn't know they were a salesperson.
45:30
As soon as you get an email from biz dev representative, no matter what they say, it's kind of like any kind of Mormon church knocking on your door.
45:42
You know what this conversation's going to be, right?
45:46
So, that's one of the key things to it. It's about language.
45:46
I really think we don't spend enough time thinking about the language that we use, as well as the reframing, but the language in particular.
45:57
I'm fascinated by this one of, let's say the word entrepreneur, I think needs to be broken down into so many subgroups because right now you only have that one placeholder.
46:09
Same when we spoke about technology earlier.
46:09
I always use the example of you've got Joe Rogan and Jeff Bezos.
46:13
They're both definitely entrepreneurs, but one of them couldn't do what the other one did at all, it just wouldn't work.
46:18
And you end up with a lot of people who would kind of pursue the entrepreneurial meme at the time, whether it's the big Silicon Valley fundraising VC firm, keep raising more and more money to the IPO, that route.
46:29
Where actually they'd probably be really happy just having like 10 restaurants that they run and this cash flow generating business.
46:39
But because people haven't created these subgroups within that, it's a real problem.
46:43
And it's the same with marketing.
46:43
There's so much to unpack there.
46:47
I use the word ego as well.
46:47
Ego can mean so many different things to so many people.
46:47
And until we kind of unpack words or create new words, which obviously the original technology, we really struggle with communication and interpretations of that.
46:57
Like going back to the technology example earlier, I thought technology meant one thing, you thought it might be other thing, and this is why you have so many debates online now because people don't define the words.
47:12
And yeah, I'm fascinated by that. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
47:13
And it is absolutely true.
47:13
One of the challenges there in my opinion is that people become label thinkers, right?
47:23
And when you're a label thinker, you're not really thinking at all, in my opinion.
47:30
If you're a label thinker, you're automating an app in your brain that says whatever. Clever.
47:36
And then you're going to go down your personal app for what clever means to you.
47:46
That's why I like your idea about you've got to be better at defining exactly what it is.
47:53
I definitely also believe though that, listen, if you're a quant, you call it a heuristic, if you're not a quant, you call it a rule of thumb.
48:03
And rule of thumbs develop because they work.
48:10
And do they work all the time? No, they do not.
48:10
That's when we get into trouble, right?
48:10
So, a rule of thumb that has 75% is right, or again is a quant it's efficacious at the 75% level. But it's the same thing.
48:26
It's the 25% that really fucks you up.
48:30
Because, if you've got in your mind's eye what a rich guy looks like or what a successful person looks like, and then you come across somebody that does not fit your label, right?
48:40
Or let's take rich out of it.
48:47
Let's take really bright and great idea generator. Okay.
48:47
And you have this idea in your head of what that person looks like or sounds like, or the types of things that you should hear from them.
48:59
You're going to miss at least 30% of what could be the best idea generators that you could ever happen to meet.
49:08
And so I always try to keep in the forefront of my mind that look, I'm just as guilty of this stuff as everyone else.
49:15
I try to reprogram myself all the time, and I'm not always successful.
49:20
But that's where the idea of mental models comes in as well.
49:29
The George Box, the map is not the terrain.
49:29
All models are wrong, some are useful.
49:29
And like there's millions of examples of this.
49:36
And one of the easiest was astronomy, right?
49:36
Under Ptolemy, he was completely wrong about everything, literally everything.
49:47
However, ship captains could use his model to finally steer their ships right.
49:52
So it's also like there's a Wittgenstein quote which is, "Don't look for meaning, look for use."
50:03
And if you unpack that and think about it for a minute, it's like, if you're looking at Ptolemy, right?
50:09
And let's say, I'm a ship captain back then, but I'm also have access to this future knowledge and I see what Copernicus and other people say.
50:20
And I'm looking at Ptolemy's system, I'm saying, "This is all bullshit man.
50:24
The meaning is all wrong."
50:24
So in other words, these are people searching for what is the meaning of Ptolemy's explanation here.
50:31
If on the other hand I'm a ship captain and I'm like, "I just want to look.
50:39
So I wonder if there's any useful information in this Ptolemaic system that I can use." Guess what?
50:45
Tons, tons, and tons and tons of it.
50:45
So I definitely think it presents a quagmire when you start doing mental models if you're not looking for use...
51:01
Also the other thing, in my opinion, at least I've found, you've got to be willing, you've got to be brutal and understand when a mental model stops working, right?
51:07
So I think that's, again, another part of this age thing, right?
51:15
People get set in their ways.
51:15
I mean, that's the term, everyone understands they're set in their ways.
51:20
And I'll tell ya, if you don't continually upgrade your mental models, you're not going to succeed, in my opinion.
51:27
I have a note here that I wanted to ask you about this.
51:34
And I think this is brilliant you mentioned Elon Musk, and the famous 21 second pause when he was asked a question by Lex Friedman.
51:40
In the old days, poison, don't do that, man.
51:50
Dead air is really, really bad for you.
51:50
So we gave an unconscious preference to the glib people.
52:00
My son always makes fun of me.
52:00
When the Clubhouse came out, the app, he goes, "Dad, if you wanted to, you could be king of Clubhouse because you could fucking talk about anything for 45 minutes."
52:14
And that's why that's good.
52:14
It's not so good anymore though. Right?
52:14
And I think this Elon Musk thing is I loved this.
52:20
I'd seen it in the past, but the way you put it into the context, I think is perfect.
52:25
What he did sort of single handedly was that 21 minute pause now means, oh this guy is such a deep thinker that he's actually taking the question in, and deciding how to answer it.
52:41
Talk to me more about that. George Mack: Sorry.
52:46
I was going to leave a 21 second pause there. I couldn't handle that.
52:52
I remember when I listened to that Elon Lex interview originally...
52:52
I'm sure this happens to everybody.
52:58
The magic of the moment was everybody checked their phone because they go, "Oh my AirPods have disconnected or I've not buffered enough of the podcast."
53:01
Hopefully a few people had that moment just then.
53:06
But again, that goes back to the best sales people don't like a sales person as well.
53:10
As well as the proof of work that he seemed to put in that pause beforehand.
53:16
And it may be completely unintentional.
53:16
It may just be genuinely how he operates or it's something he's kind of learned over time.
53:21
Actually, he kind of added in both the seriousness of the thought, because he'd fully slowed down and went against the script of doing it for purely social pressure to try and fill the silence that existed was one part of it.
53:42
And then I think the second part of it is that you could see it turning and if there's anything like silence, just breeds a bit of tension and you could see it thinking.
53:51
And all of a sudden he could have said anything then, and it would've been the most powerful thing in the world.
53:55
So the silence sometimes makes the music right.
54:01
And I think that's fascinating when you see him talk.
54:06
And sometimes some of the people who are on paper, from a charisma book aren't that charismatic, it's the nuances or the intricacies where they go against the cliche, charismatic sales person that actually makes them charismatic.
54:19
And I guess that's kind of goes back to your mental models point.
54:24
Some of the best thinkers know when to kind of disregard the obvious mental models and the ability to do that, to be unconventional at that point is a very rare skill.
54:40
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I agree, and I think that you might get enough of these kind of podcast conversations going and then somebody will point out like you did that Peter Thiel or Ryan Holiday wrote this.
54:51
Peter Thiel does this on purpose.
54:58
And that's how the change...
54:58
It's like we're not closed black boxes, right?
55:07
That's the other thing that people sometimes forget.
55:07
Our prover will do its best to keep information that our thinker doesn't like away from our brain.
55:14
But some of it does get through, despite our best efforts to block it from coming into the space.
55:21
But then you can get this kind of idea where somebody will listen to our podcast and they're like, "Oh, I didn't know that. That's interesting."
55:33
And then if they're curious, they'll go down a hole and they'll say, "Oh wait a minute."
55:37
Peter Thiel does this or your Ryan Holiday.
55:42
Maybe this is just a hack.
55:42
In my opinion, the minute somebody thinks something is just a hack, it loses its power in my opinion.
55:50
That's why I don't usually use the word hack because I've seen in the past that it can lose its power.
55:58
It's also got a lot of great attributes.
55:58
Hacking the system, hacking the brain, making a shortcut that people find very interesting and pleasing.
56:06
But it's like in my current line of work om asset management.
56:13
I have this whole thread that...
56:13
I usually just write threads right on the app.
56:20
I don't write them and then edit them.
56:20
I just do it right on Twitter.
56:29
And what I find is the ones that I actually write and think are going to be great, they suck.
56:36
And the ones that I actually do right on the app, people are like, "This is fantastic. I love it."
56:40
And I think it might have to do with that spontaneity and the creative muse, so to speak. Something got to me.
56:48
I wrote one about people who are obsessed with these lists, right?
56:56
The five things a millionaire does before breakfast.
56:56
And it just drove me fucking crazy because it's wrong. It's just wrong.
57:02
And you're pointing people who are honestly, and really, really diligently trying to better themselves and you're fucking with them.
57:18
And I just think that really annoys me.
57:18
And so like, I wrote that one on the thing, because I had seen this thing and then another one was something about what I did know and what I didn't know as an asset manager.
57:30
And it was in response to somebody saying everything is due to luck. I'm like, well, no. That's not true.
57:35
Not everything is due to luck. Is there luck? Absolutely.
57:42
And you actually talk about it.
57:42
I want to talk about that next.
57:48
I love this idea of you write, listen.
57:48
If you're AB testing something or you have to decide on whether you're going to Netflix and chill or go to the comedy club or go to a party.
57:57
Pick the one where your opportunity for luck is much, much higher. I love that.
58:04
Talk a little bit more about that. George Mack: Yeah.
58:12
I call that the luck razor and that's by far, I'd say out of all the mental models I have, has been the most useful because it comes up in such a tangible, obvious situation.
58:25
Somewhere it's like inversion.
58:25
Sometimes you've got to kind of remind yourself to think about it.
58:29
Certain models that are a bit tougher to necessarily immediately implement.
58:29
Whereas for me, the luck razor, I'm immediately placed with two options and I just go, okay.
58:37
What's going to produce the more luck.
58:37
And my brain just immediately knows, and it's like, okay. I just go with it.
58:41
And it's really hard to fool yourself I find.
58:41
A lot of times, for example, you're waking up.
58:46
You're supposed to be going to the gym.
58:46
You can fool yourself of why actually.
58:50
I've listened to Matthew Walker's, Why We Sleep.
58:50
We probably should get an extra hour of sleep here.
58:53
It's the most important thing.
58:53
It's actually healthier than going to the gym.
58:56
I'm actually therefore being healthier by staying in bed.
58:56
You can bullshit yourself.
58:56
I find with the look one, it's incredibly difficult to what are you going to say?
59:01
About, oh I may get hit by a bus on the way there.
59:05
It's really hard to bullshit yourself.
59:05
And the amount of times I've found that so useful, even conversations I have with people, when we're going to make decision.
59:10
I go, what's going to bring about the most luck and they'll immediately know it.
59:14
And it's just take that path.
59:17
And by over time, that begins to compound quite significantly.
59:17
I feel luck as a subject has been massively overlooked, ironically, because of the fact that you have two camps and it's anything that seems to exist in the internet right now where there's 280 characters.
59:36
You've either got to be, there's no such thing as luck.
59:36
You just work hard, pull yourself up by the bootstraps or you've got the free will does not exist.
59:41
Everything's predetermined.
59:47
It's those two sides going at each other where actually, I think there's probably quite a nuanced, intricate version where luck definitely does exist, but there's also some control that the individual has.
59:54
You mentioned earlier, mental models need to be useful.
1:00:00
And I've always had this kind of weird theory in my head that it's probably better to have a poker mindset play in roulette than have a roulette mindset playing poker.
1:00:09
Because even if you're playing roulette and you genuinely think it's in your control, there's probably something you could do. Maybe you got to cheat.
1:00:19
Maybe that's what it is.
1:00:19
Or you got to bribe someone or whatever, but there's still something in your control.
1:00:23
And I think having a worldview where you mentioned earlier utility in it, that luck razor is by far one of the most impactful things, because all of a sudden you've taken this concept luck, which exists on these two end of the polls by most of society, and actually taking it into...
1:00:41
You've acknowledged that it exists, but also acknowledged that you do have control over it. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:00:47
And I was putting up a tweet because I was reading an essay by somebody of the former camp that everything is due to luck. Right. And so I put up...
1:00:55
Are you familiar with the Winnie the Pooh character Eeyore, the donkey who's always depressed?
1:01:01
And anyway, I have a GIF with him being rained on by a cloud that is just above his head and no one else's and the tagline I wrote above the GIF was "I think everything is due to luck."
1:01:12
And then I signed it the most unlucky human on the planet, because the other thing, if you've read The Gita or if you've read Tao Te Ching, or if you're a fan of quantum physics or any of this stuff.
1:01:35
There are tons of synchronicities always happening.
1:01:41
And people that I see as lucky is they're always looking, they're always paying attention to, is this an unusual opportunity that I can take advantage of?
1:01:48
As something I did kind of throughout my entire career.
1:01:55
It's not necessarily that you make your own luck, right?
1:02:04
Your locus of control, which is another one of my big deals.
1:02:04
If you give your agency away, honestly, you could have an IQ of 180 and you could be the best executor in the world.
1:02:12
But if you say I lack the agency. I can't do it.
1:02:20
You're never going to succeed ever.
1:02:20
And so I don't jump into these free will conversations very much, because it just seems like mental masturbation to me because if somebody was going to prove to me definitively, definitively, that I have no free will. Okay. I'll look at it. I'll say interesting.
1:02:40
And then I'm going to act as if I have free will.
1:02:47
Because if I was going to be an evil conqueror, what would I do?
1:02:47
I would convince people that they have no agency of their own.
1:02:57
I would invent vengeful gods.
1:02:57
And I would say to them that their thoughts are meaningless and here is the one true faith and doctrine.
1:03:11
Sounds like a lot of religions.
1:03:11
It goes along with luck and I see it also in human agency.
1:03:17
And if you really want to screw somebody's sense of self, humiliate them.
1:03:26
If you humiliate a person, what you're creating in my opinion is a caged animal and they will strike out at you because humans don't deal with humiliation well at all.
1:03:32
And again, if we get over this idea that we're talking about me and you, and we just say, no, no, no, no, no.
1:03:45
We're just talking about human OS here.
1:03:45
Human OS does not deal with humiliation well.
1:03:52
And there have been tons of studies and there's some amazing books on this.
1:03:52
As you go up and down that pecking order or hierarchy, it physically manifests.
1:03:57
And I read in a book about when a challenging chimp took over the alpha male and one, literally he begins to stand taller. His testicles descend.
1:04:16
And so what's interesting about this is, if you don't think that there is a very strong mind, body physical connection with thought and body, you're going to be not nearly as effective as if you do understand that.
1:04:34
So I definitely like this risk idea and luck.
1:04:42
I think it was Picasso basically said, "Inspiration does occur, but it only comes when it finds you working."
1:04:52
so you can't sit around and think about...
1:05:01
And I put up a quote a few days ago from Barbara Oakley where it was like, "Lady luck favors the one who tries."
1:05:08
But what's interesting is these all fit together. Tries. What does that mean? Means you have agency.
1:05:16
It means that you believe you are responsible for you and George is not responsible for Jim or Jim is not responsible for George.
1:05:22
And it's another great litmus test in that one of the things that I see worldwide, but especially in advanced economies is this sort of learned helplessness and that's poison, man.
1:05:38
It's like envy and jealousy.
1:05:38
If you convince yourself that you are helpless, you are. You're done.
1:05:47
And so I like the way that you go at these things in terms of the luck razor.
1:05:55
You had another one that I think is awesome, which is the smart friend razor.
1:06:01
Tell us about the smart friend razor. George Mack: Yeah.
1:06:05
Has some similarities to the luck one.
1:06:05
The smart friend razor came from good friend of mine, Tom Osman, hanging out with him.
1:06:14
And essentially along the lines of, if a smart friend says something and it doesn't make sense or you kind of sat on the fence.
1:06:24
As long as the bet isn't ridiculous, take the bet. Take the bet.
1:06:31
If it's a small bet relative to whatever your risk tolerance is, take the bet because by definition, once you've waited for society to figure it out for you and put it into a how to guide and all your favorite analysts on CNN and podcasts are all saying the same thing.
1:06:50
Well then all the alphas gone anywhere. Right?
1:06:50
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
1:06:52
George Mack: So one of the things I do enjoy now is I'll hear someone from a friend I'll go, that's ridiculous.
1:06:58
And then I'll go, which friend said that.
1:06:58
There's certain friends when they tell you about it's time to get in.
1:07:04
And those other friends when they tell you about it's time to get out.
1:07:08
And I always use the advice.
1:07:08
Sometimes it's great to have older people who aren't that curious because when something's hit the mainstream.
1:07:12
When they're telling you about it's really mainstream.
1:07:17
Then it's actually quite good to have that perimetric...
1:07:17
Not that it's like dumb friend razor, but you know what I mean?
1:07:21
Somebody who is a lot slower in terms of picking up on trends, but having a smart friend razor is that idea of probably three to five of the smartest people you know and maybe you actually don't know them.
1:07:33
Maybe they're online, whatever.
1:07:33
But when they say something that's a bit weird and kind of makes you a bit uncomfortable and you're unsure, lean into it, as long as the bet isn't too crazy all the time. Isn't too crazy. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:07:45
I think that's a brilliant advice because your network is your filter. Right?
1:07:54
And so the other thing that I thought about when I was reading about that razor is follow people who you might not naturally follow, but they have already demonstrated some incredible insight into A, B, or C.
1:08:06
And one of my little rules is follow the artists.
1:08:14
So I collect artists, I enjoy it.
1:08:14
And I've done it for years and years and years.
1:08:22
But if you can consistently pay attention to the artists, man, you're like so far ahead of everyone else.
1:08:30
And there's actually science around this.
1:08:30
Information theory basically posits that if people hate something that's brand new, just watch because...
1:08:43
I can't remember the exact quote, but it was along the lines of... Like James Joyce.
1:08:50
When James Joyce wrote the first postmodern novel, most of the people reading it were like, "This is shit. This is awful." and the point is made.
1:09:04
That was because they didn't know how to read that kind of thing.
1:09:04
Same was true with van Gogh and the impressionists.
1:09:11
And by the way that name, impressionist was given as a slam.
1:09:19
Basically the French Academy was saying, "This looks like a child doing fingerprinting."
1:09:19
And so they did it as a slam on them because they weren't tuned in.
1:09:27
Buckminster Fuller had this great line, "You're either tuned in or tuned out."
1:09:34
And he uses the microscopic world as the example.
1:09:41
He's like, "We weren't tuned into the microscopic level.
1:09:41
Didn't mean it didn't exist.
1:09:41
It meant that we needed microscopes to tune in to that world."
1:09:49
Same with quantum, same with everything.
1:09:49
It's not that it's not there.
1:09:56
It's just that we're not tuned into it yet.
1:09:56
And so if you can find a group of people, which by the way, it's trivially easy these days because of the internet.
1:10:05
In the old days, if you lived in, I don't know, Dog Patch, Minnesota, your smartest friends were probably all either engineers or farmers.
1:10:18
And so now of course, we got the whole world and if we can kind of combine those, you can get tuned in really a lot earlier than the majority. George Mack: Yes.
1:10:34
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But you also make another point that I love because I always make the same point in business.
1:10:38
But the point of it and the reason I'm bringing it up is one of the things I said in a meeting where everyone kind of looked at me like, "Oh what the fuck is Jim babbling on about now?"
1:10:50
And it was about competitors.
1:10:57
And one of my guys had said, "Yeah, we don't have any competitors." And I'm like, really? Are you sure about that?
1:11:04
And, "Yeah, I'm pretty sure." I'm like, why?
1:11:04
Why are you acting like that?
1:11:10
And I said to him was, if we don't have competitors, it means we're wrong.
1:11:18
And you put it a different way, which was if people are not laughing at you or taunting you or teasing you about something, you've got it wrong.
1:11:26
Talk a little bit about that.
1:11:35
George Mack: There's definitely a bit of a superpower about being weird to some extent, obviously that can go wrong.
1:11:37
The ultimate mental model, I think to combat all mental models, pairing metrics, which comes from Keifer Boyes.
1:11:52
If you're measuring your customer fraud rate and you're optimizing for that, and you want to also measure your customer satisfaction rate.
1:11:57
So your customer support team might just treating everybody like fraudster.
1:12:01
So the same way with weirdness, you do want to have a parametric here.
1:12:05
You don't want to just start talking to animals and going a bit crazy.
1:12:10
So there has to be something to that.
1:12:10
But I think by definition, if you want to be different to the mean, you have to be different to the mean.
1:12:16
If you want to be in the top 1%, you have to do things different to the 99%.
1:12:21
However you define in that 1%, it could be happiness, whatever. Right?
1:12:25
So that ability is very tough because you're going to have people mocking you.
1:12:32
You build up immune system, I think, or I've found I've built immune system over time where I've had a few of those and I've seen people slowly move over and over and over homeschooling or the concept of alternative education.
1:12:42
I'm slowly seeing people move over and it's always a nice feeling when people go, "Yeah, you kind of right about that one.
1:12:50
The other one that I think we spoke about earlier is making friends online.
1:12:50
I think dating online's a great example.
1:12:56
Dating online was seen as such a weird activity up until even...
1:12:56
I know people who were married and they have a story they actually met online and they have a story of how they met sometimes that they'll tell people, because they're too embarrassed to say they met online.
1:13:11
And now it's the number one way essentially people meet. And I feel that COVID...
1:13:11
The one that was very similar to this two, three years ago was making friends online.
1:13:17
If you told people, you made friends online, you were seen as just an absolute outcast, an absolute weirdo.
1:13:21
And I think because of the fact we've got used to Zoom and Google Meet and all this stuff, people are becoming a bit more accepting of it, but I still think you're seen as weird from that.
1:13:32
But I would say looking at some of my best friends.
1:13:37
So Chris, who we know who runs the Modern Wisdom Podcast, but my friend Harry Dry, who runs Marketing Examples.
1:13:41
Tom Osman, who I know very well, who runs Charming Object Social Club.
1:13:47
Some of these people I've only met actually a few times in person.
1:13:51
Some people I didn't mention that I've not even met in person, but if I was so afraid or they were so afraid of was appearing weird, it never would've happened.
1:13:58
And I think that carries through to so many things.
1:14:05
If you started chatting about Bitcoin in 2014, the amount of people who are just going to take the piss out of you.
1:14:12
And you part of it is you've got to build up an immune system to that.
1:14:16
But also you've got to just avoid those people at the same. You need a bit of both. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. Yeah.
1:14:20
That was maybe another thing that I just was very lucky in that I didn't basically give a shit what people thought about me and that is a learned skill. You can learn it.
1:14:32
You don't have to just be born that way.
1:14:32
And you kind of build up a bit of armor in terms of...
1:14:39
Especially I measure everything as a continuum as opposed to oh I failed at that. That's a loss.
1:14:48
I think if you look at base rates and use failures as learning opportunities, A, you're using a better mental model so to speak.
1:14:57
But you're also learning that you can learn from, from your failures, which listen, how do you learn from it?
1:15:16
It's like that thing you just did and you really fucked everything up.
1:15:16
Don't do that again and so I think that there's learning absolutely available in any outcome, even if you're incredibly wrong, it's given you the opportunity to learn something.
1:15:35
I want to get back to mental models and ask you a question, a couple of questions.
1:15:39
So give me an example of the most controversial mental model that you nevertheless have found out is insanely effective?
1:15:53
George Mack: That is a tough one off the top of my head because by definition, controversial ones, I'm probably trying to keep deep in my subconscious.
1:16:00
The most controversial one.
1:16:20
I don't know how controversial this is.
1:16:20
But one that I was thinking about earlier is the falsification at a deep rooted level of essentially trying to have absolutely no belief systems and AB test everything, which a lot of people go for has some downstream effects that people haven't quite thought about.
1:16:54
So when you constantly AB test everything versus truly think about it...
1:17:03
So I'll give you an example of this.
1:17:03
Because I'm kind of rambling on here.
1:17:03
There's a huge issue, I think right now with algorithms and the way they work and we're constantly AB testing everything. And don't get me wrong. It's like everything...
1:17:17
But is not disregarding AB testing, because that is so important.
1:17:21
And we do need to falsify our assumptions.
1:17:21
But I think there's a huge thing where falsification has gone wrong at times or maybe incorrect falsification, shall we say?
1:17:34
Because pure falsification by definition is obviously a great thing.
1:17:34
What I mean by that is you'll have people who are constantly AB testing everything.
1:17:38
And one of my favorite things, if you AB test everything, you ultimately end up with a porn site.
1:17:43
You just constantly go all the way down there.
1:17:48
And it's that balance of that Steve Jobs versus that alternative.
1:17:55
One of the things I've thought a lot about with this is when you constantly look at the numbers, constant of the metrics, you lose this internal sense of taste.
1:18:00
And I really find that continuum difficult of where you want to AB test and then where you want kind of a chief quality officer where you think, what would this person think?
1:18:13
And you go ahead with it regardless.
1:18:16
And I don't know if I'd say that's that heavily controversial, but that is something that I think is incredibly difficult.
1:18:23
And one of the things I'll do with this, I'll try and scroll through Twitter at times.
1:18:27
And sometimes I'll just read the tweet without the number of likes it's got and try engage my reaction versus just looking at the data.
1:18:32
And that is insanely tough.
1:18:32
And I do think that's the sign of high agency.
1:18:38
I love the people who send me a YouTube video that's got 112 views and all of a sudden I go, "Okay, that's probably a really good YouTube bit."
1:18:42
For that person to send me that knowing there's no social proof attached.
1:18:46
That is a very, very interesting thing from today. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. I love that idea.
1:18:51
That's actually a very...
1:18:56
Because if you look at some of the coolest things ever, you brought up Jobs, right?
1:18:56
So I learned in a book by Will Storr that one of the things that drove Jobs to come up with a tablet computer was his wife was best friends with a woman who was married to a Microsoft guy who was just a general ass.
1:19:19
And Jobs suffered through these dinners.
1:19:19
Because he really disliked this guy.
1:19:19
And so the guy came over with whatever Microsoft's prototype was.
1:19:27
This is pre iPad, obviously.
1:19:36
And he's like, "In your face, Steve.
1:19:36
Microsoft's going to own this."
1:19:36
And apparently, that is according to Will Storr's book.
1:19:44
Apparently, he went into work the next day and he goes, "We're building a fucking tablet."
1:19:49
It was basically just because this guy pissed him off so much.
1:19:55
But a lot of that stuff, it's like Dre with Beats and there's so many good examples of oh, Walt Disney. I wonder if I could...
1:20:04
Mickey was originally not named Mickey.
1:20:04
We had some very pretentious name and didn't work.
1:20:12
And just through iteration, creative iteration, Walt came up with the other thing and then you go the other end and Bugs Bunny.
1:20:20
So when they came up with Bugs Bunny, they loved all of the look of Bugs and they loved the way he acted and everything, but they couldn't really figure out how to give him a personality.
1:20:33
And because the idea of the creatives was he's got to have a personality, because that personality is going to drive everything that he does.
1:20:47
And people like to know and anticipate what Bugs is going to do in a different situation.
1:20:47
And so they're thinking and they're thinking and they're thinking about it.
1:20:54
And finally one guy goes, "I know. Bugs is from Brooklyn."
1:20:58
And the rest is history.
1:20:58
Because everything that Bugs does is archetypically, what a Brooklyn person from that era was like. And so there are...
1:21:16
I think you're absolutely right.
1:21:16
Ultimately, you're going to have to do some AB testing because that's low hanging fruit.
1:21:22
And if you've misnamed something or you're not getting the benefits right.
1:21:31
And you can clearly see that through AB testing that is probably worthwhile. But a lot of...
1:21:37
If you want to be incredibly talented in terms of your design and other things to come up with Beats, to come up with whatever. You might not... I love your quote.
1:21:47
I think I'll use it as your lead in.
1:21:55
"If you AB test everything, you ultimately only end up with porn." Love that.
1:22:05
George Mack: That's where you'd end up.
1:22:05
[inaudible] I was going to say the over controversial one and I'll explain it because it definitely...
1:22:10
It feels controversial when I say it's particularly for people like us, who like to be introspective is that self-analysis and introspection might be a useless activity with the caveat.
1:22:18
Again, quite a controversial thing.
1:22:27
Based off the fact we've been self-analyzing intro inspecting so far, but with the caveat that we are a lot better at judging other people than ourselves and people see that as a negative, but you can kind of judo throw that momentum around and use it as a positive.
1:22:38
So one of the examples I always use with that is first off, just on that topic, whenever you're in a coffee shop, just take out your headphones or put your book down and just occasionally listen to the conversations around you.
1:22:53
And it'll always be gossip.
1:22:53
It'll always be, "Daisy was going to do this.
1:22:57
And then she never did it." It's always gossip. That's what we do.
1:23:02
We're very good at analyzing other people.
1:23:02
If you've got bad breath, very difficult for you to know.
1:23:06
If the person next to you has got bad breath and for sure is [inaudible] know. Right?
1:23:10
So on that feels immediately like a pessimistic scenario.
1:23:10
But then trying to flip that around the optimism from it.
1:23:16
What I'm sure you might know this, Jim, but there's a Buffett speech when he is chatting to these college kids and he says, "Look around at your classmates.
1:23:21
And if you had to invest in them and take 10% of their earnings for the rest of their life, who would you pick and why?"
1:23:31
And I always thought that...
1:23:31
I got an unpublished essay on this called Buffett money and essentially this idea, imagine this amazing futuristic cryptocurrency that whenever your friend makes money, you take 10% of it forever.
1:23:41
And you have to put together an investment thesis as to why you're going to invest in them.
1:23:46
And you go, "Okay, I'd invest in this person because they've got extreme agency.
1:23:50
I'd invest in this person because of the network they can build..."
1:23:54
Whatever kind of things that you can do.
1:23:54
Or maybe you can literally pause the podcast now and think about those people and why you've invested them.
1:23:57
And the idea of that is it's so we can so clearly analyze on people.
1:24:03
When you are in a bad relationship, it takes you two years to break up with them.
1:24:08
When your friends in a bad relationship, you can see it in two minutes.
1:24:11
So this ability to analyze other people is incredible.
1:24:11
And then you can flip that on its head and even more controversial idea. Who would you short?
1:24:16
Who would you bet against?
1:24:16
Figure out why you'd short them.
1:24:21
And then you've kind of got that Jordan Peterson thing to run towards and things to run away from that's going to motivate you.
1:24:25
And the beautiful thing I love about that metaphor as well is you could imagine you could fork that cryptocurrency and it could be [inaudible].
1:24:34
Let's say you think capitalism is evil.
1:24:34
I'm not motivated by money. Good for you.
1:24:34
And you got, "All I care about is being healthy or all I care about is being happy."
1:24:38
You could fork the Buffett coin into happiness, right?
1:24:43
Who's the happiest person you know?
1:24:43
Who's going to be the happiest person?
1:24:48
These are the reasons why...
1:24:48
Who's the saddest person, who would you short on that currency?
1:24:51
And then you kind of take those behaviors, same with health, same with whatever topic you want to learn.
1:24:55
And you've then not had to analyze yourself and be biased and had all those judgemental voices in there that's nonsense and distracts you.
1:25:00
You look at other people when you can analyze them clearly and then just kind of... Who would you buy? Okay. Steal all their IP. Who would you short?
1:25:08
Avoid all their behaviors, copy and paste, copy and paste.
1:25:13
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love it. I love it.
1:25:15
Tony de Mello who is a priest who became enlightened and then gave up the priesthood and wrote a bunch of really cool books, had a great quote, which is, "If you're trying to figure out your own shortcomings, look at what bothers you in other people." It's so true.
1:25:37
And one of the things that I used to do the sought exercise is literally try to stand outside myself and look at me independently.
1:25:45
It's virtually impossible to do.
1:25:45
Just because we aren't built that way.
1:25:54
We are all confabulating our story. And guess what?
1:25:54
We are always the hero of our story and that's true of everyone that's around you. So I love that.
1:26:00
Which person are you going to go along?
1:26:07
I mean, you could turn that into it.
1:26:07
I mean, I don't know about the shorting, right?
1:26:14
Because that would be obviously very hurtful and you could probably only do public figures who can't strike back at you, I guess.
1:26:20
George Mack: Something you wouldn't actually short.
1:26:24
It's just more the thought experiment, right. Of like, "Okay.
1:26:27
If I was too short, so then you're being super clear."
1:26:27
Think about who would it be and what would you take.
1:26:32
Jim, the question I have on that thing, you said then of the people who you dislike, it's something often about yourself or the traits.
1:26:37
It's something you see in yourself.
1:26:42
When I'm listening to podcasts, I always love those metaphors, but the one thing I always want to know is, could you, again, maybe I'm putting you in a spot here.
1:26:45
Has there been a time where you've found a trait about yourself you didn't like because of that?
1:26:49
Is there a tangible example that you can give? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:26:57
And I've tried to and have managed to correct it mostly.
1:26:57
But one of the first things that I noticed was, "Jesus Christ, that guy is such a gas bag.
1:27:06
He just keeps talking and he just acts like he knows everything."
1:27:15
And I'm like, "Oh, wait a minute. I'm describing myself." So that's one. I got others. But yeah.
1:27:26
And that actually happened to me before I had discovered Tony de Mello and I immediately thought about that one because it's just so crystal clear.
1:27:36
In terms of, we really are...
1:27:48
We're horrible at self-assessment.
1:27:48
All of us, you, me, everybody, we're awful at it.
1:27:56
But we are really, really good at assessing others. And so what a great...
1:28:06
I mean, now, in my head, I'm starting a company and it's going to be an exchange where people can actually go along.
1:28:13
Person's A, B and C and short person, D and [inaudible]. George Mack: Yeah.
1:28:18
On their workouts or their happiness. Yeah. It's fascinating.
1:28:24
One of the things that I've always felt would be useful...
1:28:24
So a lot of people criticize social sciences and that side of things, the replication stuff and whatever your opinions are on that.
1:28:35
And I felt those personality assessments like the ENTJs and the INFPs. Probably some truth.
1:28:45
I can hear the arguments both sides.
1:28:45
I felt that the way they could massively improve it is when I do a Myers-Briggs test, not only does George fill it out, the five people that know George the best also fill out anonymously and then give that.
1:28:56
And I bet that would be answer a lot of those kind of issues.
1:29:02
Because the amount of times people are fill out one of those things and they're kind of filling out the movie that plays in their head of who they are versus who they actually are.
1:29:11
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That is a brilliant idea, which I probably will steal from you and start a company that actually does that.
1:29:18
Because it talk about the way to get a radically closer to what you actually are. That's brilliant. Because it's true.
1:29:26
It's just absolutely true.
1:29:26
And the evidence against...
1:29:26
I think the only one of those personality tests that actually replicates is the Big Five and the one you're referring to...
1:29:42
I'm an ENTP, by the way, George.
1:29:42
Is the Myers-Briggs, which is a little... It has got a few things. Yeah. True.
1:29:49
I'm a veteran test taker and so I've taken both that and the Big Five for the last 30 years.
1:29:59
And Big Five always comes up the same way.
1:29:59
The Myers-Briggs always comes up ENTP as well. But I don't even know.
1:30:07
I probably am not an ENTP.
1:30:07
Maybe that's the way I like to think about myself.
1:30:15
And so the genius of that idea, the five people who know you the best. Wow. That might right there.
1:30:20
I think you just maybe invented another company that I'm going to start. So, thank you.
1:30:29
George Mack: No worries at all.
1:30:31
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so, we are actually getting close to the end.
1:30:34
This has been absolutely amazing.
1:30:34
I have one question and then we're going to play the game that we always play at the end.
1:30:43
So if you were giving a young person advice right now, and let's say they wanted to start an online company.
1:30:59
Are there specific platforms that are going to be good for one kind of business that would be terrible for another and vice versa?
1:31:05
George Mack: So you want about from a growth marketing perspective or a young person just starting out in a career?
1:31:13
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Let's do it through the growth marketing perspective. George Mack: Okay. Oh yeah.
1:31:16
That's [inaudible] our podcast in itself.
1:31:19
Twitter, LinkedIn, amazing for organic, terrible for paid ads, amazing for kind of higher brow audiences, B2B, et cetera.
1:31:25
Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, a lot more lower brow.
1:31:34
Facebook, Instagram, awful for organic these days, because it's a paid platform.
1:31:34
TikTok incredible for organic, the kind of skew...
1:31:40
It's interesting that the platform's kind of create individual creators themselves as much as to creators make the platforms due to the restraints.
1:31:50
So TikTok by definition, skews shorter form, low brow, quick attention grabbing content.
1:31:50
Whereas, YouTube does have elements of that, but can also skew to three hour lectures on the Bible getting five million views, for example.
1:32:04
So it would massively dependent on that.
1:32:04
And then you want to think about okay, where your audience is and how your business model can factor into that.
1:32:16
So based off your margins, based off your acquisition prices that you can afford, based off your LTV, all the...
1:32:21
It's not easy, but it's really simple.
1:32:21
It's really, "What business model do I have?
1:32:27
Who am I going to go after?"
1:32:27
And then you kind of look at the acquisition on like you're building an army.
1:32:32
The biggest mistake people make is that they don't do that first.
1:32:37
They do that after two and a half years of running the business and they go, "Oh, okay, well, you know what?
1:32:41
My audience is on Instagram, but it costs me 50 pounds or $50 to acquire a customer.
1:32:47
But my margin I make is only 50 pounds LTV.
1:32:47
So this business is never going to go anywhere."
1:32:53
So actually asking that question up front or speaking to an expert is, "Oh my God, it's so valuable because just by..."
1:32:59
Most people don't do it because they don't know what they don't know.
1:33:03
And they're regular to these things.
1:33:03
And also they may have known it two years ago and it's then changed so much by definition.
1:33:07
So that's the answer I give to the growth market one, which would be different to the just young person starting out.
1:33:14
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, since we're doing it, let's give some more goodness to our audience.
1:33:17
If you're a young person listening to this, what are you going to tell them to do?
1:33:21
George Mack: I'd go back to what I would tell myself to do.
1:33:24
So again, there could be so many individualization here.
1:33:28
But if I had to really look at somebody who's similar to myself, one of the things I feel that exists right now is college.
1:33:33
Assuming you are not becoming a doctor or a lawyer is incredibly valuable, incredibly costly at the same time.
1:33:41
And it feels the vacuum isn't great either.
1:33:48
So it feels like getting into hundred thousands of dollars of debt is clearly not a good idea for most people.
1:33:53
But sitting at home, working a really remedial job, probably isn't a good idea for most people.
1:34:00
So one of the model, again, it really depends on where you are, but one of the models I've thought about is if I had to redo it again, rather than study a humanities degree and spend all this money on these things and get in huge amounts of debt, I'd go to the college or go to the university campus, but just never study.
1:34:13
And then just use all my free time to stack skills online, get the partying, the socialization, maybe have a part-time job.
1:34:20
So I'm the richest one there.
1:34:25
By the end of it, I've had four years of fun.
1:34:25
I've learned a shit ton and I've got the benefit of going without the debt.
1:34:30
And I feel that's what I would do if I was 18 again.
1:34:30
That, for me, I don't know what...
1:34:35
It feels like you don't have to do either or you can do both.
1:34:39
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love that.
1:34:39
I mean that what a good piece of advice and I'm going to catch so much flack for doing this because there are...
1:34:49
Especially people around my age, "What do you mean don't get a degree?"
1:34:49
And the good news there is, I only got a degree because I promised my mother, I would get one.
1:34:56
And that was back in the eighties.
1:35:01
And I don't use anything.
1:35:01
I have a degree in economics and economics is almost always wrong or the wrong way to think about something. I love that. Because you... [inaudible]. Go.
1:35:16
George Mack: The great thing about this, Jim, is that if you actually... If you take this...
1:35:17
If you go to a logical argument about this, if you go...
1:35:22
The education itself, attending the lectures is valuable.
1:35:22
Most lectures you can walk in for free.
1:35:26
So you can literally go and do it, anyway.
1:35:26
The only thing you don't get is the six figure certificate.
1:35:31
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly.
1:35:32
I love it because that's another part of the great reshuffle, which I have that diploma with which suggests that I have competence.
1:35:41
Your method, you don't have that, but you demonstrate you have confidence. Who am I going to hire? I'm going to hire you.
1:35:50
I don't care what degree they have.
1:35:56
If I'm looking at two levels of competence and this guy or woman is just like, "But I went to Harvard, I went to Oxbridge." I don't fucking care.
1:36:01
I want to see, can you actually do it?
1:36:08
Are you actually thinking.
1:36:08
I know a lot of people who are great.
1:36:08
One of my best friends in life is also one of the smartest people I've ever met.
1:36:14
And he doesn't have a college degree.
1:36:21
As a matter of fact, when I was getting to know him, he came over for dinner with his wife.
1:36:26
We were friends as couples, but I was specifically quite friendly with him.
1:36:32
And first thing he asked me is, "Jim, I want a two page reading list from you."
1:36:32
I'm like, "Bob, what are you talking about?"
1:36:39
He goes, "I want you to give me things that, so that I'm not a dummy.
1:36:44
So that when you make a remark, I know, oh, well, that's what Shakespeare said in Hamlet." And so I did. And this guy just...
1:36:51
I gave him Will and Ariel Durant's Story of Civilization, which is 12 volumes. He read it all. And so I would...
1:36:57
It's like Goodwill hunting.
1:36:57
I would put him with no degree up against somebody who got a summa cum laude degree from Oxbridge in history, Bob's going to win because he taught himself all of this and we get so obsessed with these pieces of paper and it's losing...
1:37:23
I mean, now, in the past, it was required.
1:37:23
There was no way around it, basically.
1:37:29
Well, listen, man, this has been awesome.
1:37:29
I will in fact mention you if I create that company about the new personality testing and I will say, thank you too. I will. I'm very kind that way.
1:37:36
I definitely don't want people to think that I came up with it myself.
1:37:45
But here's the last question that we always ask and what it is pretty simple.
1:37:50
I'm going to wave a magic wand and I'm going to make you the emperor of the world for one day. You can't kill anyone. So no killing. No killing. Sorry.
1:38:05
You also can't put people in camps, reeducation camps.
1:38:05
But what you can do, what you can do is you can incept them.
1:38:13
You can whisper into our magical microphone, two things, and it's going to be an ear worm for them.
1:38:23
They're going to wake up the next morning thinking they thought of it or they had a dream of it and they're going to go do it.
1:38:29
What two things do you got for me? George Mack: Two words?
1:38:37
Jim O'Shaughnessy: No, no, you can say... George Mack: Two things? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. Two things.
1:38:41
You could say read more or whatever.
1:38:43
George Mack: I love how you caveat the genocide first off is off the table. Just in case you've...
1:38:51
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Off the table. Exactly.
1:38:53
George Mack: What two things.
1:39:00
Probably the two things I come back to...
1:39:00
And again, it's going back to parametrics are probably two polar opposite statements or feels like that because I feel you get value out of those two contradictory truths.
1:39:14
One would be have extreme agency over everything.
1:39:23
Believe it's all in your control.
1:39:23
Take everything seriously. Try your best. And yeah.
1:39:31
Just be the kind of person you'd call.
1:39:31
If you want get out of the third world prison, it is one thing.
1:39:38
And then at the other end, I'd go, it's all just a video game. It's just fun.
1:39:48
All this is going to disappear.
1:39:48
No one's going to remember my name.
1:39:48
No one's going to remember Jim's name.
1:39:52
No one's going to remember the listener's name.
1:39:52
The universe is going to disappear in a blink of an eye. It's all gone. It was all just a game.
1:39:55
So you then have intense meaning that kind of motivates you.
1:40:00
But then sometimes that can be so anxiety inducing.
1:40:00
You then got intense nihilism at the other end and being able to pull those two levers when you... It makes sense.
1:40:10
I think is really important.
1:40:10
So those are the two things that I'd whisper around.
1:40:16
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I got to tell you, I love them.
1:40:16
I wrote a very short thread about that idea that everybody wants this meaning in life.
1:40:18
What's the meaning of life.
1:40:26
And the more you dig, the more you find.
1:40:26
There is no external meaning to life.
1:40:26
And that leads you right to the bridge of nihilism.
1:40:33
And what you got to do is cross the bridge of nihilism because on the other side, everything's black and white on this side, everything's in color on the other side.
1:40:44
And you get to realize if there is no meaning to life, I get to create the meaning in my life.
1:40:53
So what a great two, agency plus the ability to realize we are all but dust and shadows and that freaks so many people out.
1:41:03
But to me, it's like, "That's awesome."
1:41:03
Listen, George, this has been fantastic. I had a great time.
1:41:16
Tell us where we can find you, online. George Mack: Yes.
1:41:22
So if you want to find me on Twitter, that's george__mack.
1:41:25
If you want to chat business, marketing, that's multiply marketing agency that we run.
1:41:35
So yeah, either of those two options, best place to find me.
1:41:39
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Perfect. This has been great