everything's got to change like we are still saddled with Antiquated Educational Systems that basically were put in place to make sure that you would be a good lad I think video game psychology is massively neglected because it's seen as a thing that people waste their time with and the one thing that video games do insanely well is there's so much meaning when people are playing even
though there's no meaning the laziest nihilistic people I know can spend 16 hours back to back Conquering the video game is that person lazy or is reality just a very poorly designed video game My Time Horizon is infinite because now I have five grandchildren hopefully I'm going to have great grandchildren if you're clicking Refresh on the stock right you're going to fail if you could have that frame that you're
just one day going to take off the VR headset and you go I was only gone for 5 minutes but this whole thing felt like 70 to 80 years how different would that be well hello everybody it's jimo shasy with potentially one of my favorite previous guest rejoining me I have with me today George Mack who is H God George I don't even really know how to describe what you do what you do is you come up
with the coolest point one 1% of ideas that you've come across and razors and you go down rabbit holes I I mean like maybe a DNA test I I might have been active in England over right around nine months before you got born George welcome well thank you for having me Jim one of my favorite podcasts to listen to and one of my favorite people to speak to so it's uh it's good to be back and you know it was
funny because as I was getting ready and going back through your stuff um I came across the the video game uh idea and and it it and it uh involves Rick and Morty which I I Adore Rick and Morty I had not discovered Rick and Morty and and my daughter was visiting from California this is several years ago and she's like well Dad you you know you must absolutely adore Rick and Morty and
I'm like what's Rick and Morty and she goes oh oh my God I have now you I this is going to be go into my scrap book is one of the best days because you are going to love Rick and Morty and and you've talked a lot about there might be some real advantage to thinking about your life as a video game I used to call it um back when in video games there was God mode and and I always said okay I'm just gonna shift
into god mode here and and it it's very very helpful but please develop the thesis for me and share with our listeners like I guess the question uh one of the my teammate said basically just I think what you really ought to ask him is if life is a video game how can our listeners and viewers play on easy mode it's a big question I think the video game hypothesis was partially inspired by the Roy scene Rick
and Mory and then partially also inspired by like the simulation hypothesis which for the kind of new age atheist crowd was the most depressing nihilistic thing right and you just just this NPC and this simulation of infinite simulations that exist and you have the debate around that and moving the dial from simulation hypothesis to video game hypothesis is it true that's not what
I'm here to kind of consider to be honest with you but is it useful that's a completely different way and I do think viewing things as a video game is incredibly useful so I don't actually encourage to go on YouTube and search Roy the Rick and white scene it's two to three minutes long but the key thing for me with the video game hypothesis or living life as a video game is first off the video game
industry worth more than music TV and entertainment combined and then I think it's that you add a 2X multiple and then you roughly get that right so whatever they're doing it's working um I think video game psychology is massively neglected because it's seen as a a thing that people waste their time with it's seen as something silly which again is usually a great area to study because
people are kind of moving it to the side and the key realization I had with video game psychology is that the laziest nihilistic people I know least disciplined imaginable can spend 16 hours backto back Conquering the video game so you then ask the question well is that person lazy or is reality just a very poorly designed video game and that's when I was like ah and I began to look at all the times where I'd be
motivated on a project or excited to do a project or excited to do a thing and then the inverse when I didn't want to do the thing or I hated it and you began to realize it was just whether it was a well-designed video game or a poorly designed video game so I mean there's two Ops of the conversation there you can then go super philosophical as well as you can go very very tactical with it
too um yeah if you got any specific questions or what you like need to explore so I I think that what we would would be fun to explore is the idea that wienstein had a had a great line which is don't look for meaning look for use I kind of live my life that way right like so so many people are like oh what's the meaning of life or what's the meaning of this but and and that's a rabbit hole
that I've been down right and and then I had this realization when I came across something I'm like I don't believe this but man if I believed it it would be really useful in my life and so I started experimenting you know as if right so I'm going to act as if even though I I'm I don't really kind of believe it so what H how do how do you get our listener or viewer into that mind friend right how do you get them to
think okay um here's what I want to do um and here's my talents as I perceive them one of the things that I found it that is very useful that I think you agree with is sometimes if you look at yourself as a third person what happens is you see yourself actually as other people see you as opposed to the way you see yourself and that can be quite disconcerting but then it can get very very helpful right
like you know if if this if George came to me and said hey Jim I'm having this problem what advice would I give guess what the advice I'm going to give to you is going to be much better than if I have exactly the same problem and I personalize it right so let take us through what would be helpful for our listeners viewers to uh set the stage for this idea that okay uh it's wrong but maybe life is a video
game how do I maximize you know my the things that I think I want in life and that would get us from strategy to tactics right I think as you mentioned then around the wienstein quote truth and meaning again this the whole truth conversation is one part of a day but particular around meaning in the Modern Age there's such a lack of meaning and the one thing that video games do insanely well is there's so
much meaning when people are playing even though there's no meaning so it's quite paradoxical um in its nature so you have that the second Factor you have is is that viewing the character that you're playing so viewing Roy in the Rick and Morton scene which he shows where he goes from having all these dreams and then he gets stuck at the carpet store and then he constantly
thinking about leaving the carpet store he gets cancer and goes back to the carpet store and then ultimately he falls off it falls off the carp store rack dies and immediately he woken up and realized the whole thing was a video game so if you could have that train that you're just one day going to take off the VR headset and you go I was only gone for five minutes but this whole
thing felt like 70 to 80 years um how different would that be and it's an interesting question then of why is there such a Diop of people with such good video game players but then have such such terrible um time at life and I do come back to that of well is it a well-designed video game so then looking at every single thing of like how could I turn this into a Mor fun video again so um like even basic psychology
principles right so if you're creating a project like one of the things that I used to do before I had this realization was let's say the project is build a website that is just a essentially setting level 37 of the video game that I'm playing and at any point I've not buil that website I'm a constant failure so if I was to release that as a computer game tomorrow nobody would play
it because it has no feedback loops it doesn't it's not aware of the stage I'm at there's no dopamine there's no nothing right versus if I break that project all the way down say okay well level one let's just write down all the ideas I could do about this and then level two is well how about I start structuring the LS and what's beautiful about that is once you've checked off level one and level two you've already
made a little bit of momentum things are moving for you you've already aware of all the next levels you have to do and you chunk it step by step and most importantly you feel like a success at each individual stage versus when you go back to that project mindset of level 37 of build website that you're constantly in this binding state which is why I think so many people procrastinate
forever and it's really interesting as soon as people get a little bit of momentum behind them as soon as people get the little win on the video game and it's that perfect sweet spot of that flow state of enough that it's challenging enough that you can complete the next step but also not too much that it's overwhelming and constantly looking at every little individual area like you were hired by Grand Theft Auto or a
video game designer to make it as addictive as possible and I know even though I know this even though I run about this every single time I fall off something it always pretty muches back to it being fully design video man the uh it it reminds me of the signf episode where George is deciding what he wants to do and he's in Jerry's apartment and and Jerry goes well you
know like what do you what do you like and and George goes well I I really like making comments about professional sports and maybe maybe I could be a commentator on one of the networks and Sherry goes yeah George those jobs are usually reserved for people who you know had a long career in broadcasting or you know were were athletes themselves and so George had set this crazy thing up here that as I
watched it the reason it's funny I think is because it's making your point George is going up to the 100th level and saying from level one that's what I want and of course he's he's setting himself up just for complete disappointment because you know there there's no alignment between where he is in now and and where he wants to be and so I think I love the idea of of doing you know starting with level one right because I
agree completely that if you have like crazy ass goals and you just put them up here uh you know you're just going to you're setting yourself up for failure because you're just going to be disappointed this right you see this like so the probably to make it broader for the audience here because there be a lot of people like oh that's cool my son plays video game I never do but when you
actually really begin to just zoom out and go well let's just call it a game and then all of a sudden you can kind of see that everywhere you can see how Twitter is a game where follower count is the metric you can see how money which I've spoken about before I think money is the best video game ever designed because it's multiplayer it's a single number going up and going down um and you can contrast yourself constantly
to where it was last year it is the single best video game ever you can even look at Brazilian jiu-jitsu which has become so big right now and when I speak to people who do it one of the most rewarding things they find is the belt system you go from white belt to one stripe two stripe three stripe blue belt and all the way at Purple belt brown belt and you're constantly getting these
strikes even with Crossfit the way they do the uh uh rep Maxes and things like that and you notice everything that really begins to take off is a super well-designed video game or a game period and things that really struggle both from an individual and a societal perspective or when the just the game mechanics are terrible yeah and you mentioned metrics there and you've written a lot about metrics and and how
often times we just have the wrong metric you you mentioned about Twitter I I I look at Twitter as performance art basically and I I the follower count I could give a about I think it's a vanity metric I think it is absolutely meaningless but as you point out if that is the metric that people are focused on that is going to elicit all sorts of behavior right because they're looking
at that metric and they're thinking how do I get more followers how do I get more followers and then you see the same kind of drek and and you know uh I don't know Freds lifted right out of Wikipedia um and now that we have ai oh my God right and and and so that's a metric that I find absolutely has negative value really I I care about reaching people like you I found you on Twitter
so I kind of optimize the people that I follow and the way the way I post things kind of like as a beacon hey are you interested in this stuff too and and that works so much better for me because it allows me to meet people like you to meet people like half the team at oy Adventures I found on Twitter but talk a bit about like that aspect of it how how can people get better metrics than the OB
one like follower out on Twitter a this is a six-hour conversation stop yourself in Jim so I think on this point there's so much to be said so zooming in Twitter and then we can zoom out so when you have these metrics you do end up creating these feedback loops or these weird parts of the video game that then occur so as you mentioned then there's people who then post on Twitter and then
purely judge the quality of that post based off the likes and the the reach that it has and the fundamental problem with that is you're optimizing for width and I understand why because they can't measure the depth there's no depth measuring and one of the ideas I posted a while ago and I hope one day it gets picked up and whether it's this version or an iteration of this is like some kind of golden like system where people
have one golden like a week that they can use and I would love to gauge the quality of my posts up that versus the number of likes and reach that I get even myself now I'd find myself at certain point getting a little bit hooked to the algo or that video game and I go oh that's actually a really bad video game to play so what I do now is either post and then I ghost so I don't
see the numbers don't see the metrics and just T from it and it's been so much heier canceling that video game and then I really focus on the quality of would have like just purely the metric of the foll would I consume this so if if I was the reader would I like this and if if that's the number one metric and then number two is the DMS or the quality of people um that share it or message me
etc etc and that has completely changed my writing style by focusing on that however the problem is right now I have to kind of do strap that together of like oh a little bit of good feel around who dm' me but I can't fully measure the depth I can't fully measure these things and I think there's so much to be said there's so much to be said about when hidden metrics become visible the as a
result the the players in the video game completely changed their realities completely changed our outputs super small example of you've seen alcohol um consumption decrease quite a lot and I don't think it's the stall Factor but certainly a factor even with myself there's been sleep trackers that people track that sleep and even though they still KN they still had that hangover feeling they still kind of fell tired
the next day seeing GRS go down like the 2008 crash is very very different so when it goes from being uh hidden to visible the behavior completely changes and and you can see and you extrapolate further and further out you can look at something like money where again money the best video game ever designed but how well that person sleeps at night their peace of mind are things that you
can't really measure nor can that individual measure and one of the fascinating things about hidden metrics so let's say something like Peace of Mind fing with parents um St with loveed on and stress levels is they're hidden all the way up until the point they hit zero and then they become the most visible thing ever so when they go from unmeasurable unmeasurable unmeasurable disappears I.E um time barot goes to
zero or uh stress levels go to zero and you have a mental breakdown all of a sudden then they become extremely visible but the problem is right now is there's certain metrics that we can measure in life's video game and there certain metrics that are much harder and i' encourage people to be strap them where they can um like using the example I used to Twitter there because
otherwise you can end up a drift playing a video game that you don't want to be playing purely because of the scoreboard that somebody else has designed so extending it then to life right uh so we we talked about Twitter but I think you can also extend this to your own life so walk me through how you would like if I was hiring as a consultant right and and you were going to come in and you were going to work
with me to say so Jim let's let's think of life as an infinite game right instead of a a finite game um and you know what kind of questions would you ask me to try to get me to optimize on the correct metric because I totally agree with your assessment about people optimizing for the wrong metric they're not even thinking about it right but then as your next example of of sleep metrics right like I don't I don't use
them and I don't use them for a specific reason my son uh was loved them and and like he was all over them and he was like Dad you're gonna love this because you know it's quantifying everything and I'm like no no no I'm not gonna do that and then he was like you're crazy dad and then and then I don't know a year goes by and he says to me oh by the way I I stopped with all of the metrics on
the sleep and I went okay why and he goes well because I woke up I felt great I'm like I'm so looking forward to today I think this is oh this is he was said I was pumped I was ready and he goes and then I look at the metrics and the metrics told me I had a shitty night's sleep and he goes and literally it took over my body right like kind of this weird Placebo or nobo effect right
looking saying here's how I feel this tells me I'm not feeling that way and then that has a really powerful no SEO so so so consult with me tell me tell me how to optimize Jim on that specific point and then I'll zoom out to to the gym game which I think you almostly doing incredibly well with but we'll give it a go so on the specific sleep bu I've thought about this as well I think that's a perfect example of where a
metric's gone wrong right where that's almost the metaphorical equivalent ref freshing the the stock price every day and it's run down slightly and you're selling everything right I think if if you if these devices actually gave you the ability to only check week you got a weekly report of how you slept based off the things that you did that all of a sudden I think would actually I'm
surprised they haven't done that yet because it would bring back quite a bit of retention of people that I've seen that have churned from them because you do have those uh inverse place boes that do exist um zooming out to The Wider thing around um the video game as a whole I think ultimately it comes down to it's quite tough without obviously understanding the individual's goals and the individual's
values however I think the key thing is to flet out what those things are and then designing like infinite games that you can play as regular as possible like one of the things I and then and then figuring out the the feedback loop that makes sense for that metric I eat sleep daily probably doesn't work but other metrics of time left with iner important person finding that out every decade
might not be optimal either so really thinking that through the next thing I think is just constantly getting momentum once you design those values and those goals just constantly getting momentum with set the is and set constraints I think the more constraints that you can then enforce on something the better like one things video games do really well is constraints I was Ching to a friend of mine the other day
who was having a tough time of his business and he was saying but I said if you saw the tomorrow go what would you do he goes I just played golf for six months I okay I go why and then we started going through it and ultimately gol's just an amazing game and he loves the fact that There's a constraint of ball here ball needs to go in hole and I can improve it every single day so then
looking at every project whether that's I want to learn how to code I want to learn Brazilian jiu-jitsu I want to reach XY Z at the law firm reverse engineering okay what so let's say for example level 10 or let's say even further at level 50 is black belt in brazilan digit Su or selling my or making $1 million that year okay well what's what's level 10 level 10 is probably going to be making $100,000
that year and then all the way all the way down and makebe you know what level one is making the first dollar online and the great thing about that is I say you make the a gives you the momentum to make the first dollar online or to go to the first j- Jitsu class or whatever it is so you get that momentum to get started which is half the battle with all of these things and you can see the
next one you can see the next one versus when it's make the million get the black belt become head of the war firm you're constantly in this Gap all the way until you get there that you're a loser or that you're you've lost the video game and then you get there and you get the classic five minute Reef high and it disappears anyway versus with the video game approach step by step by step
you're stacking wins wins wins wins wins which is actually ultimately be called infinite game mindset anyway and more important than the specific outcome that you come towards so yeah just a Luke background it's so hard to design it I know people like to be try these days and give specific advice but without knowing their values and their goals however the fundamental principles of creating the Milestones um designing
systems um having a level one all the way to level 50 framework of whatever that big goal is um and having clear constraints with specific things as well um other key kind of fundamental values that I'd be thinking about as applying a video game to somebody's life and then last but not least the metrics that you use whether they're available for you or you have to bootstrap them and how often
you're going to check those metrics yeah I I think that's great advice uh one of our Motts at oy Ventures is cowl walk run um and and it seems to resonate very much with the team because like uh we're starting a a book publishing company and so rather than say yes we're going to be the most important book publishing company ever no we crawl we're gonna we're gonna publish one book let's see
how we do let's see if we can get that done and and what's funny is that you can just see the change in demeanor of the entire team oh okay well yeah we can do that and then all of that time gets spent learning oh didn't think about this o didn't think about that right so I I think one of the problems with many people as you've just eloquently put it you don't start out at the black belt in
in the martial art right you start out as a novice who's gonna everything up for the most part and like so what what if I was taking Marshal LS what would be my goal for day one just do one thing right just one that's like all I want to do is one thing right I assume I'm just going to do everything else wrong what's cool about that is what happens if I do two things right right it's like I'm gonna get wow I was I just
did two things right so I'm gonna get really excited about that and as you say carry the momentum but the the other thing that you write a lot about and I think that we're really sympatico on is agency right like like high agency people are the people you really really want to associate with and you have a great thing uh on agency and and we'll talk a little bit more about it but I
love the one question that you ask about agency and and if you're thinking about all your friends right and you want to figure out who has the highest agency you ask what one person would I call if I was stuck in a third world prison I love that get are are there other ways to find people with agency or or avoid people or are there markers for the like the ones like they seem to have a lot of
talent and everything but you know they just don't have any agency yeah the the key astics on that question which I need to add is almost imagine that you take away all their contacts and all their wealth so my friend Chris from Modern wisdom asked Steve from Diary Co this exact question and Steve would why like he'd call Prince William I he's a friend of his right well that's an example where the
question breaks right you've got to have the specific criteria of they they have no contacts they're purely they can't use their wealth but they're purely through a combination of different things and then you go what that's a great thing of identifying my agency because like what is what are those things it's not just IQ because we know people who have super high IQ that couldn't get you out of the cupboard
right let alone thir so it's not like Q it seems to be and it's not just pure work e the keeper because we know people who would work so hard and again still would be able to get you out of the cover so what is it and why why is it those people would be the people you would pay and I think it's a combination of resourcefulness is probably the most important thing of just being able to
figure out a solution to a problem that seems to be a huge factor with it it seems to also be a like a combination of resourcefulness the ability to think extremely quick on their feet um the ability to have a high locus of control because even the act of thinking you can break somebody out of a c prison is an absurd thing that most of people are just like can't do it mate so even you
obviously this absurd self-belief that you can do it paired with a high locus of control paired with Relentless resourcefulness and a Sprinkle of some kind of different forms of intelligence internet that seems to be the fundamental stack that parades High agency because they have to look at the world and be able to say a this is just a video game I can change this B I've got this some kind of skill to be able
to do it and see if not I will eventually figure out and D that determinism that they will not quit so it's a it's a weird mix of different things paired together that you you immediately know it when you see it which is why everybody who's listening to the podcast now could immediately go Oh I know have called to Brak me out of the thir War jail and I'm willing to bet typically they AR the most academic
person in their group typically they're not the most athletic person it's something else of those combination factors that we discussed there that that those people have and you immed whenever you get around those kind of people they have a few different things as well so one um they tend to have quite weird teenage Hobbies is one thing that I've noted because by definition if you've been able to do a
like learn how to juggle when you were 14 no girl found that sexy and none of the boys at school go oh look at the guide of conj jugle great he's here right but if you then go when despite the prefrontal cortex not even being developed yet that you're still going to learn how to jugle and get lacked at there's a sense of locus of control and obviously resourcefulness in terms of figuring it out and a
determinism to keep going that exists other things um other things on the checklist are uh an energy Distortion field I mean I think you've got this gym um like we spoke online about treadmill versus so friends and high AG toy people I've noted the when they go into a room the the energy of the room can completely change they completely destroy it or you could see them like
really bummed out you're ready to quit on everything you don't want to do anymore and you have 15 minute chap of them and you're ready to go run on a maratha treadmill Ultra incline so they just seem to distort energy to some extent I don't know the the scientific version of that I don't know how to describe that but you again you just know it when you feel it another thing is you can't guess their opinions so um
they don't line up because by definition if they have agency they've thought about things with their locus of control and sandbox society's opinions through their own unique filter it seems to be you might agree with them you might disagree with them a lot and the worst kind of person is a high agency associate that's a dangerous dangerous person right that's the kind of person
who uh who ends upon a Netflix documentary so if you can't guess their opinions that's a good thing because by definition if oh okay you have blue hair and you live in this part of town if I can go check check check check check check you're going to believe check check check check check check check probably quite low agency and that's not whether that person's right or wrong it's just by
definition if you downloaded all your team's opinions again there's probably not that much agency there however if you go hold on a second you're this like boxer hard man but I've just looked at your notepad and Pen here and you write the most beautiful poems by by definite for you to have done those two things toplay agency because you had to have almost moved those two things in completely different directions and not
cared about other people think about you or if you have this m Queen on Instagram that has two million followers and this fashion deal but she's obsessed with n again quite a lot of the agency that exists there right because it doesn't line up um I think another big criteria or two three more I'd add um one is the kind of immigrant mentality so if fundamentally immigrants tend to be higher agency
because by definition you've had to have moved from somewhere you've had to have looked around at your surroundings and gone this isn't for me this isn't the best place in the world so there's some kind of emotional intelligence that exists there or ability to go against the crowd you then have to operationalize a move which takes resourceful D it takes breaking into some kind of mini little jail and then
you've had to have started all the way from the ground up and it's it's quite a crazy start of um number of unicorn Founders in America it's it's something like 50% or some give will take year or year is are immigrants and that kind of lines up and begins to make sense it's interestingly I think Americans tend to have much higher agency than the US sorry Americans tend to have higher
agency than Brits and I've been fascinated by like potentially why that is I think one of the reasons is when I went to America had this realization which was we have so much in common between Brits Americans but also something's different and fundamentally it can only explain when you realize that the Americans were the on when the boats came and it was like Hey going to go to this island far far away to the
middle of nowhere you may die on the trip but there's going to be Freedom D D D D D the Americans were the ones who were like yeah let's go and the Brits were the ones who were like sounds ridiculous I'm going to St yeah and you actually could understand a lot of differences between the UK and the us at result of that and as a result the Americans I think one thing that the UK
could take from America is a lot more agency there's a few other things that could build a true gym but um I don't know if you got any anything to run through all that the uh I uh there's actually a book about that and it's called The hypomanic Edge why America being a little crazy uh I'm forgetting the subtitle but it's essentially that is the thesis of the book The Thesis of the book is America is America because
it was all the crazy who got on the boats and came over here right which de demonstrates agency and willingness to take risk and all of those types of things and and I have a lot of British friends and the I love British humor right because it's very different than than American humor in many regards because one of the other things that I notice is uh for example the designer who uh work we work with uh
for our homes and offices she's a Brit and she's from the north of of uh England and and she was saying to me we were out at dinner and we subsequently became very good friends with her and her husband husband's a creative director they've lived all around the world very interesting and I'm like so you know no why are are you staying in America as opposed to like going back uh
home to London and and and practicing your crap there and she just started laughing and her husband did too and I said why why are you laughing and she goes Jim in in the UK none of the Park's people would hire us and I'm like why she goes listen to my accent and and like literally I just looked at her dumbfounded and I'm like what she goes you don't understand it we apparently don't have a class
system in the UK anymore she goes we bloody well doom and you can tell instantly when somebody opens their mouth whether you're going to be willing to work with them she goes so like here you Americans don't give a and you just think oh lovely British accent and she goes so here it's this amazing Advantage back home in the UK it would be a disadvantage for me and then we kind of got in her husband mentioned he
said the other thing you Americans don't have is tall poppy syndrome and I'm like okay that one's new to me and then he explained you know the the tall poppy gets cut uh down and and so the which which occasioned me to say that you know America and the UK are are really kissing cousins but uh they they are uh United by uh a language that I that both of them use completely
differently right uh divided by a Common Language so God that just makes me think about so many questions so it it let's say you're trying to gain agency do you think that that's do you think that it is genetic do you think that it's environment I'm thinking also of the German general who who categorize um uh uh clever and lazy they should be at the highest level of command stupid and lazy they're Cannon
Potter send them to the front um and is there a way that somebody can kind of gain an ability to be a more a agenic person so the truthful answer is I think it's will be a lot generic but going back to at the start I think having that as a belief will make you lower agency so it's probably useful to go yes it's 100% in your control so and that the irony is saying that is quite a high
agency thing to to say right figured out the problems yet so we have that going on I think fundamentally it can there's one there's one thing there's a magician in the UK that he's not that big in America it's absolute shock you need to check him out Jimmy jhab it's a guy called Daren Brown oh he's he's one of my heroes you know that I was a when I was a teenager that was my first job I was a professional
magician and I I I love Darren Brown I've watched all of his stuff I've read his book on happiness I love I just love him but continue in there's a documentary called the pucks where he he filters people beforehand and then essentially long story short just Conformity by Conformity begins to like say hey to the person and better mind they don't know it's him it's all actors all set up and they
didn't even realize they got STS on the TV show this you could definitely have some moral quandaries around that but again we'll leave that with truth for a conversation for the other day where step by step they get him to conform from putting meat in the vegan fatter all the way up to moving a disabled person all the way up to hiding the body finally last but not least the police are going to get here unless you push it
man off the building and you can see that how you can just slowly but surely remove um somebody's agency like if they started off and tried to get him to push him off the building he would have said no and I'm sure they scored him for hyper agreeable so even then they had to chip away so by definition if you can chip away at somebody's agency my natural inclination is for therefore yes
you can increase that step by step in some kind of video game fashion I think realistically it's probably just cranking up the dial day after day day after day and probably being quite delusional and just having the civism Derek civism of what's use useful but not true the everything that I'm responsible for even though it's cost not true um but having that will likely begin to Cronut the agency dial one
thing I think a specific habit or two habits that you can do that I think can increase agency is one check out as much Niche content as you can because by Def even the act like this is the bicep C of agency right here go to YouTu and just click on the thing that has 32 News well I click on the thing that you the society is apping you towards that is the bicep pill there and nine out of 10 times there'll be
Duds but one out of 10 times you'll find like insane content creators really really early on or Trends really really early on so I think that is a a big thing that you can do I think there's a Chrome extension that removes all engagement metrics from Twitter and things like that so that's always like having the um the stabilizers on agency where you're realizing the amount of
stuff that you used to consume is just because of number of likes or number of views on it so I'd say that's a big thing I'd say if where you can ultimately just be around more and more High agency people it's a very cliche Trad thing but it definitely begins to rub off on you and likely and likewise being around low agency people I found personally also begins to rub off on me one um thing to
really identify High agency people which is quite counterintuitive is that high agency people tend to be quite mean to your face because they they're not really that toxic they don't what my friend Chris Williamson calls toxic compassion they don't have that they'd rather be rude to gym upsetting now but realistically that that problem's going to solve itself out versus is quite low
agency people they they want the reverse trade they want to be nice to you because they don't want to have to deal with any form of conflict or disability and then they want the social benefit of being able to slap you off behind your back because that gains their social points over there so yeah I definitely think you can increase if you can decrease agency therefore you can increase agency I think it's a video
game step by step there's things you can do around Niche content there's things you can do around how you surround yourself with but ultimately I think going back to what we had at the start of the conversation of if you do life as a video game that alone increases your agency because you just decrease ah this thing is just a game so if it's just a game you decrease the setting you decrease the fear you
decrease a lot of anxiety that comes with that and constantly trying to clock back into realizing there's just a VR headset on all along yeah and uh that actually uh was an idea that I thought would be cool I don't think we're there with the tech yet but then you had something on it too which is another great way to um elongate one of the things that I find that really is a problem with so many
people is their hyper hyperbolic Discounters of time right so you made the point like if you're if you're clicking Refresh on the stock right you're going to fail I can I can almost guarantee you that if if like so my I learned a great lesson from one of my first clients in Asset Management he was a 72-year-old guy uh in the western part of America he'd made his fortune in gold prospecting and he had he had sold the
all of his Minds to baric Golder which is a Canadian company and so he had this huge Fortune right and uh he he had read my book what was at Wall Street so he called me and he I want you to manage my money because I like the way you're doing things so out there and uh I'm like okay so given your age we probably should have this kind of portfolio and it was pretty conservative right and he
and he he's sitting in there and he's got this wonderful face just weather beaten and just a a you know kind of like this beam of sunshine at the same time and and he looks at me and he goes Jim Jim don't talk to me about that stuff and I go well what what do you mean and he goes what what's your what what what would you put your grandchildren in I said well I don't have a grandchildren
yet he goes okay well what would you put your kids in I'm like well i' put him in this very very aggressive thing over here and and he looks at me and he goes talk to me about that and then he points at a photo right next to him and it's him with his kids and his grandkids he even had some great G grandkids and he goes my time Horizon is in it and he said that pointing at the picture and
I'm like oh my God that is so brilliant so i' like literally adopted it for myself like my time Horizon is infinite because I have Grant now I have five grandchildren hopefully I'm G to have great grandchildren and there's Charities that I want to be able to support after I die that change alone like just gives you such a different look and then you did this in the idea of VR right where you're you're 90 years
old and you're the worst version of yourself right so you're like everything is wrong you you've done nothing in your life and and suddenly there's a knock on the door and on the other side of the door is the best version of you talk talk a little bit about that because I love I love that piece of yours so I came up with this idea and again probably add this to the high agency checklist which is spending time
alone some form of solitary confinement and solary confinements probably be like squatting certain amount of time certain amount of it's good but if you squat forever it's probably going to break every single hip and knee right but I think naturally we air towards too little solid confinement in the modern age anyway so I went away had very electronic um no social media I just with my own
thoughts around about day three or four things get a bit weird they get a bit crazy both good and bad um but you do begin to realize a lot of the stuff you're doing is purely Outsourcing your agency to the TI and one of the things that came to my mind how did you stop just Outsourcing your agency to the tide and one of the wacky weird thoughts I had was well if you looked at combination of Roy the whole Christmas
Carol um idea of the past and the present and the whole Jeff bz off's regret minimization framework and you created this weird love ay and F monster of the three and you sat there and you take the VR headset off so you close your eyes and you imagine this whole thing was a video game entire time take the VR headset off and you was just it's 2075 and this was just an app where you
could throwback to your younger years and you realize you're in the worst cat of imaginable there's just dirt everywhere the main still haven't come in to check on on you you're wandering around your whole body's just feeling like you ran a marathon and the higher intensity you can CR that emotion the the less agency you need to change the more the more emotional you are the the
less agency you need to change things and you're reflecting on if every worst trait that you had like the worst version of you completely took over everything from your relationships to your decisions to your um career choices etc etc what would that look like you get a really bugly image and then as you're at the peak of that regret you get the knock at the door and it's whatever that door opens
and that version is whatever reason is's he's lighter on his feet he's still got a full set of hair like the he dresses a little bit better um he's no longer he's not a care home because he's still with his his family and things like that and he's then replaying the memories of the wife that you could have had and then you realize there's five minutes left on the clock once you've been through that
process and it's ticking ticking ticking ticking all the way down to 5 4 3 2 one and that Peak emotion of oh like I'd give everything to go back to Georg at 29 or Jim at 61 you have that trade with the devil where he says listen I can make you go back but you have to do something different that moves you towards the higher cell today and that as a exercise um that doesn't require psychedelics
which can often go wrong for a lot of people can get you into a state of I think a lot of change without having to ingest some chemical um so wouldn't necessarily recommend it if you're not a stable person but it is quite a a powerful exercise I love that and something I I learned uh luckily young was that idea of uh quiet t uh you know people people like over complicated in my opinion
right uh and you know oh no no no to meditate correctly which is basically what I call quiet time right uh to to meditate you've got to do this this this this this this this this and AG bics no I'm not interested you you could achieve almost exactly the same thing and I've done this for I don't know 30 years literally at the start of every day I sit for 20 minutes with no electronics no music no nothing and just
sort of sit and it is wild so when I started it right a long time ago I just thought for for like the first I don't know three or four we weeks I'm like this is stupid this is stupid this is stupid and like you know the timer back then I didn't have an iPhone right I had a a stopwatch and and so you just look at it and it's like dick dick you know 20 minutes felt like 20 hours then all of a sudden if you
persist and you stick with it like all of a sudden you start like getting flooded with all sorts of ideas that you you're kind of like wondering where the did that come out of and and so again as I think about it and I and I put it in your context basically if I didn't persist for that first four weeks right it would I would have never known this right and and so I know that uh
Chris is a friend of mine as well and we've talked about this in the past like all you you got to do sometimes is just persist a little bit right like I if if if you if you want to be a podcaster or a writer or you want to do any of these things like there's going to be this whole period of time where like nothing happens and and and then and then goes vertical and and so that's what I found
with this quiet time basically it's invaluable to me now right because like it's uh you know it you don't have to do it in you don't have to do it the way I do it take a shower I don't know whatever just stop thinking about like I need to do this I need to do this I I need you to do this and do the quiet meditation well there's a few thoughts on this that immediately come to mind so one from it there's so much Alpha in
that right now because so few people are doing it so so many people are immediately getting on their cocaine F first thing in the morning and just inhaling everything that comes in um so the sage Alpha in the same way maybe having a personal computer in the 80s or 7s was a thing because people back then nobody had any information whereas now they have so much information that ability to just add a digestive system
is is so so important particularly in a ag of in leverage I great the the other realizations I had two on This was um one um make run a little F experiment gym of like how many thoughts can you remember from yesterday there's not that many right like if you look at the DAT suggest like 10 to 70,000 thoughts a day happen and you realize so much of this is just going into the abyss and you're
constantly having these thoughts so the ability to slow them down and process them um I think is so valuable particularly doing at the start of the day but the a bigger version of this I've found is talking about video games at the beginning is like 0 to 25 is an amazing video game because there conent little Milestones it's like grade one grade two grade three grade four all the way up
college boom boom boom and you constantly getting these summer breaks and there's Milestone Milestone Milestone whereas if adult bird it's just think up to 25 it's maybe wedding mortgage uh kid funerals funerals of BL ones followed by your funeral um and maybe Co sprinkled in there that's the only thing that a silver lighing with the co thing is people see things as preo and postco
and it acted as a milestone in a lot of people's lives and I know the US has much worse holidays than the UK the UK has quite a lot of holidays um that people can take us paid leave but just plotting all whether it's a quarterly by week uh by monly whatever works for you some time out to set reass set go again so at the micro level that 20 minute again or whatever works for the
individual but also at the micro level as well having that time to build of things through is I think so important because otherwise it's always you always want to assume You' have no agency let to play Devil's advocat my old position I want to run a game or what if I have such low amount of agency at least if I pause things for a while it stops the momentum of things so it requires a lot less
agency to make a change which I think is what's beautiful about your 20 minute thing or my kind of Soko when you take four to five days out and just be with a notepad pen and maybe a few podcasts is the it's fundamentally one a as a milestone so a nice little video game marker before and after pumps but also you fundamentally slow down time and slow down momentum that you can change tracks and it requires less agency so
when you wake up first thing in the morning and sit still for 20 minutes you're then starting from sub car base to move from and build from versus if you was on Instagram and then you pull into this thing and then oh you run this quick Zoom call now before you know it you're in the car home you taking off the V headset and uh that's where you're at the uh it it feeds so many questions
as well another thing that I think that we are really sympotic on is the idea of optimism versus pessimism um like so I I call myself a rational Optimist and and what does that mean it means that like I'm not Peng glossy about right it's like yeah you know what if all this stuff happens that I am working to make happen it's going to create lots of problems and and rather than say oh no it's going to be
perfect I I always budget in but the problems that if if if this works the problems that it creates are going to be so much better problems than the problems that I have right now right and and so the I I I like to say like pessimists sound smart optimists make money because like and and yet I also had seen something else that you had talked about which was this uh a kind of
people get even the terms wrong right because when you say optimistic to a lot of people they think naive optimism right it's like uh I saw something where you were I think it was you talking to Chris actually where you were talking about the book the secret right and and and you can manifest uh this and manifest that and and of course I I kept journals all my life and and I found this thing that I wrote when I was I
don't know 26 or whatever and it was you know life's formula and I had uh energy of Mind thought times energy of action times energy of random occurrences squared and I got that one wrong I think uh because your luck raiser solves that one one like if you've got two opportunities pick the one that's going to give you the greatest amount of luck or the potential for the greatest amount
of luck but where I think that naive optimism gets it really wrong is oh gee I just have to think that I'm GNA Be A Millionaire or I'm gonna get the hot girl or and and that's it if you put it in that formula energy of mind could be a 100 man you could be manifesting all day but if you're sitting on the couch and you're not doing anything energy of action equals zero and this is a criticism uh anything times zero is
zero so how how does that fit in do do do you think that um tying it into agency tying it into um shorter feedback loops that allow you to gain momentum compounding is another really important thing right because it got bo bo bo right like Buffett he he made the vast majority of his wealth after I think age 65 and uh where does the idea if you were gonna if you're gonna bring optimism and
pessimism in how how would they factor into the way you're looking at this well I think the the first thing to do is the whole optimism and pessimism debate is a strange one where people shout back and forth at one another versus if you turn it into a matrix of optis and OPM optimism sorry and pessimism on one side and then low agency and high Agency on the other and you can see the Matrix there all of a
sudden you then factor out Jin's example of the guy who's super optimistic all like I'm going to be a billionaire d d but he then sat on the couch super low ages um so like there's like one of my favorite alltime Twitter moments was well I I realized this is it's just not just obviously good enough to be optimistic agency is the ultimate Factor um so this like Peter teal quote which
is um if you're going to win if you think you're going to win it doesn't mean you're going to win if you think you're going to lose you will lose if you think you're going to get an A on the test you won't always get an A if but if you think you're going to get an F you'll always get an X and uh I posted that and then I think Elon mus replied with well I thought Tesla and SpaceX were now I had a 10% chance of failing
and he's like the probably the the prime example where I had to update my model ultimately he's an example of somebody who's probably actually quite pessimistic or bounces between pessimism and optimism depending on how much he's like slept at night or whatever but he's agency do charts so ultimately optimism and pessimism is an interesting one but the agency is probably the single most
important factor but it is quite rare you get somebody who's pessimistic and high agency like him he's probably an freak but the ultimately the most important thing is agency and but I think ultimately to get Agency for most people you need optimism in the first place because if you think the the future's going to be terrible and you almost bakes in that you have no control
over it versus I think for an individual like him he's uh pricing in so many different variables that he can still factor in 10% but therefore I need to give it a go and he believes in his agency so much he can make an impact so I think having a debate of pessimism versus optimism is incorrect it's that multi-dimensional of ey agency eye optimism and low agency pessimism um or low agency optimism um there lots of
different variables that you can you can consider and contemplate so so this leads me to think like one of the things that we're trying to do at osv is exactly we think for example Hollywood has stopped making good movies and so we have a film division and essentially we're going to try to make those good movies uh because people need something to ins we're very mtic creatures right and that's great because
the miror neurons there's a great quote uh that I put up on Twitter a little while back William Von hipple and he goes drop one of us speaking about human beings drop one of us naked and alone in the wilderness and you fed the creatures of that art of the Wilderness drop 100 of us naked and alone and you've introduced a new apex predator to that part of the forest and and the reason I love that
quote is like Duality things don't and not everything is a dichotomy right so oh should I be competitive or should I be cooperative well the way I look at it is you should be both right because as that quote makes uh very very plain the reason you and I are having this conversation the and where are you today physically I'm in Dubai okay you're in Dubai I'm in Greenwich Connecticut we're
looking at each other we're having a great conversation why is that it's because people cooperated and built on other knowledge and built on other knowledge and built on other knowledge and here we are right and so ultimately being cooperative is like that's the solution to the prisoners dilemma too right which is the game theory right um Douglas hoffstead in Gold leer boach had a great uh appendix
his notes are even better than his text sometimes and and like literally talking about and he wrote it a long time ago when people were still coding and so they had a game where people we're going to play the prisoners dilemma and that for those who don't know it right you and I are both we're we're uh criminals and we're Partners we both get caught they separate us they put me in one room
and you in the other room and then they say all right listen Jim if you give him up you go free George goes to jail for 10 years and uh if he gives you up you're going to go to jail and he's going to go free if you both ride on each other you both go to jail what's the optimal strategy right well the optimal strategy as any wouldn't would intuitively know is that we both keep our mouth shut right
because they don't have enough evidence they need one of us to finger the other guy right but so Hofer talks about how they played this as a computer game and like most of the code was like pages and pages and pages and pages long but the model that won consistently was called tit for cat and it was a it was a Treeline code start the game with your first round cooperating if you get ratted out re
retaliate but then go back to cooperation that always wins uh I really when you say that as well that is a ace point for the midw be the the three line code what the both the the idiot and the genius is three line code versus all the complex theories wow on them there's a specific point you mentioned then that I wanted to bring up around creating movies and uh entertainment one thing I've not
really heard anybody discussing you got any thoughts on this which is if you look at the history of entertainment reality TV it's quite modern so reality TV I don't know about America but in the UK had big brother and things like that that came along in the 90s early ughs but before that it was all um entertainment there wasn't really much reality TV whereas social media just kind of splits so social
media was immediately reality TV of people posting about their lives and uploading things and be because of the fact that the tool that exist I can write about my life and I can post a LinkedIn status about what I'm doing today but for me to create a 4our movie that I've created in my head it requires a lot of investment and a lot of technology that doesn't exist yet however with new tools that have begin
whether we're five years away from this or 20 years away or five months who knows is that going to flip things where you're going to see the ability for movies to become decentralized the same way reality TV became social media even though it looks a bit different likewise I I just like the movies of the future will look a bit different or the fictional characters of the future will look a bit different um really really
intrigued to see what happens with that once you remove the money and Technology mode that Hollywood currently has yeah I think uh actually the te the tech is going to be here partially it's here already um and essentially like I'm very involved with AI as well what AI is is a tool and it's a amazing tool and it's maybe the biggest lever that we as humans have ever created but essentially
I think that uh AI married to a human got to be married to a human like we're gonna see a tsunami of just direct just and that's going to be the stuff that was 100% generated by an AI and then we're going to see 10% that is really griffing that is really great and that's going to be the result of a human interacting with the leverage of the that the AI can help them in the
creation of that movie in the story development in all of those things now I think will will they will they be similar like hero Journeys right I've talked to people who are basically like every great book ever every great movie everything that you've ever consumed and loved is the hero's journey right and and and so I I went down that rabbit hole and it's kind of right because essentially it it's uh
back to Rick and Morty he calls it the story wheel but it's basically the hero's journey and that's Campbell Joseph Campbell and and Star Wars and Harry Potter I saw something online that was brilliant it was basically it it showed the outline for Star Wars and then it crossed off all of the character names in Star Wars and inserted the har Potter names and they fit they're just absolutely perfect going down so the the
the idea that I think we're moving into a period where we're going to see a huge burgeoning of creativity because the tools are going to be available again brings us back to agency right because all of the highest agency people are going to say look at these tools that I can use I'm going to experiment with that and they're going to go back and forth It's called the senar model in AI
right senar being the mythical creature which were half Feast half man um and and and I definitely think that that is coming and I think it's I think you'll see it I would predict that you will see a movie hopefully from infinite films uh that was essentially create it that way and it's going to be intensely gripping so I think think that we're moving from a time period of mass production to mass
customization and like everything I call it the great reshuffle everything's got to change like we are still saddled with in America and I think in the UK Antiquated Educational Systems that basically were put in place to make sure that you would be a good lad and sit quietly in that room and do as you're told right so it it it selects for everything that is wrong with the agid we're going into right it selects
for low agency willingness to conform willingness to sit you know be boor do your thing you know correct answer machine insert it in your head and now we're going to move I think to individualized education we invested in a company called synthesis which essentially does that it has an AI tutor and it models itself on you George like you learn a certain way and that's the
way it's going to teach you but with the the the broader thing that I see Happening Here mass production moving to mass customization and the tools are now becoming available where like literally like five years from now you're GNA have I would I'll make a prediction hopefully I'll be able to convince you to do with infinite books you're going to have three best-selling books you're going to have little movies
that are based on those books that are on YouTube that you could charge for you're gonna have this whole thing that you know is you and it's going to be super cool but again you're narrowcasting you're not broadcasting that's the other thing people like 64 million Americans watched uh an episode of I Love Lucy right um the closest thing we've got to that would either be the Harry Potter movies
or Game of Thrones Game of Thrones like 18 million people right so we're moving to this period in my opinion where there are going to be all sorts of little Hills that you can conquer right the the the power law isn't going away however the amount of places where the power law can occur are expanding geometrically right Expos entially right so you you you don't have to care about
99% the way of broadcast like you don't have to think like I Love Lucy you you can think like Game of Thrones you can think and and then produce that so one thing I don't think people have priced in with this yet is right now to use a metaphor you can be a reality TV star on line but you can't be Christopher Nolan and what that means is there's so many most influences now imagine if we could
only watch reality TV that for me is kind of what social media is like and it means that which is great and there's people who like to be on camera or whobe reality TV is not the right metaphor they like to be a Leonardo deio there's so many Christopher Nolan out there right now that are talented that are kind of left in the wings to use an analogy a weird analogy for another industry when only fans came along it
created this new kind of adult content creator that didn't exist before because you'd have to use the Production Studios whereas now people who wouldn't have gone into that then suddenly saw that as a career and as usual the adult industry always leads the H things right so I think that's not been priced in at all the amount of Christopher Nolan that are sat on the sidelines that can't produce
content yet will slug the internet that don't want to be on camera don't want to be the face of things that's a big thing to think about one thing on this though that I think is kind of ignored by the media that will be studied by historians and I could be wrong on this and I think it's both a double-edged sword in the sense that I do wonder if we're going to if we're going to see or if we're
already seeing particularly me as a writer the slow death of reading that's beginning to happen so if you look most people no longer read that much like if you look at the stats in America it's declining life crazy so as a writer that's a potentially really bad thing um however the good thing is all great content a or visual will need great writing and my hypothesis doeses kind of make sense in the sense that both video
and audio as um human beings consuming things is much much goes back a lot further than reading us like it's tens of thousands obviously the visual field is like 70 million years ago when we evolved that and I think the true Pioneer that we're seeing right now that will'll get mimicked a lot in the future is Ray Dalia where Ray Dalia writes the book for like the hard call 1% and then
he releases on YouTube the animated version um and that completely blows up so I think that's probably going to be what the future writing is like where the book is actually probably like the vinyl record that the hardcore super nerds do but realistically reading's beginning to Decay more and more and more then the hardcore people sorry the less hardcore people obviously listen but most likely have these crazy
animations that are visual that appeals to them I think that is a much more likely version of the future for riters um I think the the push back I would give you there is Reading in general is declining the the what we would call Super Readers is actually going up the amount of people there are 20 million people in America who read one book A Week most of the books that they read
are fiction that's new to me and by the way I'm learning all this from uh a company that we just invested in yesterday um and the guy's brilliant and and he broke it down like he's like yeah you're right reading is going down in general but there's 20 million people who read a book a week that's our audience right and and so I personally think writing has never been more important and and for a reason
similar to what you just asserted I think you're right I think that the multimedia the visual we we are visual we're storytellers and we are visual because that's what develop that's what Evolved first right and and so I love the idea by the way of the book being for the hardcore and then and then the YouTube version or the the whatever being for the one that actually pays
your bills um but I think that I would tie that back to your early statement there are so many Christopher Nolan out there who up until this point in history literally right they they was just yeah can't do it I can't raise that money I can't move to Hollywood I can't do you don't have to do that anymore very hard and again agency related to move your physical zip code very easy to move your digital ZIP
code right and so right now we are going to see a Cambrian like explosion in my opinion because all of those Christopher Nolan are saying wait a tick I can I can use I can do this and it will create a video are you kidding me and so where writing comes in is they're G you know you got to start somewhere right and if if you write it out I'm a huge fan of writing obviously because I think it's also good
for goal setting and all sorts of things but the the combination of the ability to become a Christopher Nolan with the tools right there's a lot of them and for example one of the things we do is we give these fellowships right and and one of the reasons we do it is because for all of history I God knows how many Einstein were born lived and died and we don't know anything about them
because they had The Misfortune of Being Born in you know Bangladesh or you know uh in sub Sahara Africa or you know somewhere where there weren't a lot of people right now if you've got one of these and for those who aren't watching but are listening I'm holding up an iPhone you can you can find you wherever you are and so you know I I feel compelled like part of my thesis is we can now find and fund Geniuses
let's do it and and so I definitely think that we are going into a period where you are going to see this huge expansion of all of these like many I don't know that I would make them reality TV based but like stories right I I there are so many great stories and so many variations on those great stories now I'm I'm conflicting with my earlier statement that says everything was a hero's journey but like that's
that's a that's a big pallet on which you can paint right you can do all sorts of them um so I definitely think that that is sooner it's coming sooner and that there are going to be all sorts of things it it ties in really well with your um with your idea about what is the media ignoring that historians will spend a lot of time talking about that's where all the alpha is right yeah
because all the alpha is in things that nobody's paying any attention to but 100 years from now they're going to say hey you know what was the most important thing that they did back then and if you look and search for those areas that's one of the reasons why I love what you do because you give people tools to reframe and start thinking about it right like if the only thing that comes out of this podcast is
huh I never really thought about being high agency and wow maybe maybe I can start trying to you know be more assertive or or goly if he can figure out all of my opinions by hearing one of my opinions then maybe I'm an NPC and I don't want to be an NPC yeah yeah MPC is the is the lowest agency setting of the video game I think on the one Arc that's like quite meta but the same way you say everything's of
the heroes journey is what is ignored by the media but will be studed by historians is the societal level of me on my deathbed like what am I what should I be thinking about now so it's a very similar to the exercise that we did earlier one's at the individual level ones at the societal level and I mean one of the easy ways or one of the fun ways to do is which I I think there
there might be a book that's coming out about this or different tools that need to get created of what did the media think about previously whilst XY Z was bubbling up um and you could see and likewise at the individual level five years ago knowing what I know now what was I focused on I see the journal entries and what should I have been focused on um this the great Jeff Bas offs question as well of also asking
well what isn't going to change of uh when they ask him like well we that's great let's try about all these new innovations that happen it's ch about AI it's ch about storytelling how everyone could become their own Christopher noan but the problem with that is it's it's quite hard to predict and we I'm sure we'll look back five years from now go we were so right about this one and we
wrong about this one however is it the case that 10 years from now when these tools start the hero's journey isn't going to be there realistically they're going to be there in a lot of the films and Bezos has that of well listen I can't tell you everything that's going to change in Amazon's business but I can tell you 10 years from now nobody's going to say I want uh more expensive prices I want the
delivery time to take longer um I want less choice on the website so constantly thinking about that but I think ultimately yeah what is ignored by the media that will be studied by historians or neglected um caused so much verality because it's this the societal level what is current Consciousness thinking about because it's busy and it's just reacting and it's mematic versus 20
years from now what we're going to wish we're going to think about there's such a similarity between that and the whole death bet visualization or 20 years from now 50 years from now what am I going to think about because both the individual and the societal can get so caught up in mtic because it doesn't have the time to process things because it isn't doing the 20 minutes in the morning to build to the
information yeah and you know it's uh there there's a great quote I can't remember who said it but it's along the lines of no matter how intelligent somebody is no matter how creative no matter how insightful you cannot ask them to create a list of things that would never occur to them and I think that one of our principal problems in our human OS right which is the our shrink WP programming when we come out
of the womb we got human OS in its in its factory settings right and and one of the factory settings for human OS is we think that we fall into the Trap that we know everything right now and you can even demonstrate yeah but if you just look like a hundred years back uh David de who's one of my heroes right uh who wrote the uh beginning of infinity it's the best scaffolding or how to think
about things that I think anyway he's like what we uh this is talking in 1900 what were their opinions on the internet and on um uh you know quantum theory well they didn't have any because nobody had invented either one of those right and so we fall into this trap even when we can look back if if we go back 500 years you and I we have a time machine we jump in the time machine we go back
five 00 years we have already pre-selected the 10 most brilliant people that exist on Earth at that time we know where to find them we go and ask them all of their opinions and guess what George they're wrong about everything right and so you can show that and people would say well yeah yeah those people were wrong but we now know that they were wrong and we're right so if you play the the the temporal pincer
like tenant I love tenant it's a it's it most people hate tenant uh because you know why do you love it like can't make any sense of it well it's a temporal uh pincer movement right so if you can for if you can project yourself into the past 500 years try projecting yourself into the future 500 years that's your idea of what is the media covering that historians are going to be far more not
covering rather that historians are going to love and this idea that we think we know everything is one of the is it's a real bug not a feature of human OS if you're willing to admit to yourself you know what probably right now like I would say the vast majority of my beliefs are wrong I don't know how they're wrong I know that uh I try to sort them by which are the most useful right but I might
even be wrong there and so the idea though that the alpha if you will that you can find is in in the things that you write about right and and you know to that end you have a great one that I would like our listeners to hear and it and it's where you find something uh it's going to determine whether it's going to be really uh uh helpful for you or whether you're way way too late to the game and
it's the Reddit to Facebook continu talk about that one yeah this is my idea around predicting the future Trends and within that is if you hear something on Reddit or you hear about the trend on Reddit or even X to some extent certain poet you're Pro you might be onto something if you hear something on l or Facebook um you're definitely too late so like read an X maybe early Facebook LinkedIn
definitely late and they're actually useful filters to have because I can know when a me has hit its um $69,000 bitcoin price like what you can figure it out as soon as a certain person on a Facebook account post something or a certain like if like M had post a thing to me about a certain topic that I know they don't care about I go oh okay this has now hit MX way quicker but what's fascinating it's that cycle is getting
quicker and quicker and quicker what it used to be you could get alha maybe two to three years ahead it now spreads so much faster it's interesting to see I'd love to do a post about this that seeing each platform as its own like meme information eyeway and like what spreads on Tik Tok is slightly different to what spreads on Twitter it's slightly different to what spreads on YouTube and
there's different roles and you can see how certain creators that blow up on certain platforms are always the products of that platform where if you took a well-known person on YouTube and we tried to get them to work on Twitter it may work but often it won't and of the information highways that exist so like Reddit uh that tends to skew more earlier adopter Niche PUD nimous um
helps get break out of that Overton window um as well as building around communities versus Facebook or LinkedIn which tends to the me information highways tend to be a lot older people tend to be a lot more conservative people means that by the time time the mean was passed all the way through those respective highways and ended at that mean information Highway there's very little alha in that information
except the alpha is we're now at Peak that is the alpha that you can get from it I love that uh I used to I had a version of that and I I had a certain group of people who show all remain nameless that whenever I heard something from them I knew it was totally over and and like uh I'll give you an example so during thec phrase right um it it started really in the late 90s but it didn't really reach its peak until like
middle of 2000 and George how did I know that I knew that because almost all of my people I I called it the uh the uh what did I call the oh of course everybody knows that people and when they started calling me and telling me hey Jim have you heard about this whole online thing I knew bail danger danger danger and so the I think you could also find that in like in the various social mediums I
think you're right like I I have several experiments that I do on Twitter and like 30% of what I do is just for fun just shits and giggles but the rest of it is like I'm testing hypotheses and like reactions are are like really great like for example how do you how can what's a sorting mechanism for somebody with really low uh low agency right so post a quote and or reference a book and they're the
people who respond well which version of that book should I read or you know what's the best translation I can tell you two things George they're never gonna read it but if they do by by some accident read it they're never gonna understand it right because like they they it they think that it's it's like virtue signaling right it it when you virtue signal a lot of people don't understand that that
again back to our human OS we see so much virtue signaling because it gives us a a a a hit a dopamine hit that makes it feel like we actually did something right you know I I stand with X right and there I showed them that that accomplishes nothing but if you if you think about human OS as a system it it accomplishes something for the person doing and then you fall into that trap
and it gets back to the formula right if if if energy of action of actually taking action equals zero it doesn't matter you can signal all day long and if you don't act against what you're signaling nothing has been accomplished other than maybe maybe making you feel a little bit better but it also fits in with your with uh your your midwit uh which I love I first off I love that that Meme I think it's really really
funny because there's so much truth in it right and and and so of one of my researchers said the the question that I really want you to put to George is what is his most midwit opinion or feeling what what what you got for me who that's a good one on the spot I mean the example you used earlier the tax strategy might now be on there the all the thousands of lines of code was
ultimately beat by the three lines of code and the t t strategy that might be one of the ultimate ones that's on there I think there's other ones the midwick Mee it's fundamental on it it's really interesting to see internet means in the classic sense of image um so not classic sense the new the new sense of funny image so the kind of dkin sense which is idea that Pras um which ones stay and which ones go like
some are so hot and then disappear but others like really last a long long time and the midl means an example of that that seems to not be fading like it's it keeps reappearing and I think the reason why is it just encapsulates such a human Primal experience of idiot and genius coming to the same conclusion and most of us being the person in the middle over complicating things I think might
ultimate favorite midw me is like the meta midw me where the idiot and the genius say uh I'm the guy on the left and then the guy in the middle goes I'm the guy on the right that might be my favorite midwit and I think the ultimate midwit razor or filtering process is is to just always try and avoid being the genius because that's the mistake the midre makes is he thinks he's the guy on
the right and unless you've got some Tesla level of IQ and even then I still don't think it's necessarily useful certainly not for a a midwit like myself as a recovering midwit going through of like well how can I dumb this down what is the dumbest version of this because if I can't D this down where it's super simple of Aller is in Aller is out or if feeling bad good night's sleep like this this if
I can appeal it to the if I can make it appeal to the idiot therefore it may have the chance of passing to the genius as well but the mistake I'll make is thinking that I'm the genius and ending up with the 10, of line of code that gets beat by the the three the three pie line of code I love that I think that that encapsulates so much because you know that's the that's the other razor which
is you know if you want to know what your own uh failings are look at what bothers you the most in other people and and the midwit I'm I'm the I'm the genius that is the classic there is I grew up in min OTA and uh there was a very popular radio program by Garrison Keeler called the Prairie Home Companion and and he was set in this mythical place called Lake won and and his his tagline was welcome
to Lake won where all the children are above average and everybody is beautiful and and so that type of thinking is just emic right it's like men are especially guilty of this um like when you look at surveys of men as to self- rate their athletic ability amazingly they're all in the first or second Des off right and and so like I'm in the tent just to be clear but we we we are so so that is both problem but also
part of the magic right because as we were talking about earlier it might be helpful to be delusional right it might be helpful to say you know what I can do this I can go yeah and and and achieve this but the the the thing you've got to try there is then let it forever test against outcome right like that's the way I do it at least right like I believe a lot of stupid things I'm sure and how do I how
do I surface like some oh Jim you idiot how could you ever that was right is by forever comparing it belief action outcome right and if if the belief the outcome keeps getting up and it doesn't come out anywhere near where that belief and action got you you're wrong and you know if you're an investor I always call it Mr Market that that's not my term that's uh uh Ben Graham's
term but one one of the things that really helped me in my asset manag career was coming to the realization that if I thought one thing and the market thought another I was almost 100% of the time always wrong right and so when you can with that simpler right because there's the market Bo here's the way it's valueing whatever and if you if you get married to this idea that I'm right you're wrong you're
going to have a bad life because in in in the market and it's basically what made me a Quant right I was like okay what does all the evidence say okay here's what the evidence says here's the number of let's say buying stocks with the lowest PE uh Works 70% of the time and this is I'm just making these numbers up one of the things that you realize is 30% of the time you're going to be dead wrong and one the
problems of and I one of the things that I always thought was advantageous to a empirical quantitative approach a systematic approach was you have the cheat code because you know going in 30% of the things that you're going to buy are not going to work and you still buy because you also realize that you don't know what 30% it's going to be so at my original firm I used to always pull all
of my my team right so here's the list that the Quant uh algorithm generated all right which 10 stocks are going to be the best ones which T stocks are going to be the worst ones invert because invariably by self-included we always picked the 10 stocks that we thought were going to be the best and they almost always were the 10 worst performing and and the ones that everyone thought were going to be
the worst performing ended up being the one the ones that hit it out of the ball I don't know is there is there a razor for that that that could be useful it's an interesting one yeah it would be trying to take see yeah what do you think do you think that's pure Randomness what do you think call that I you know that that's the question that I'm still struggling with I I so the the randomness one of the things that I used
to do uh when you still had to buy music at record stores right uh I would I I'm in a habit of going into Tower I I I would do this at least twice a year I would go into Tower and literally buy 50 CDs randomly and the reason that I did that was because I wanted to discover new music I love music and so that's how I discovered techno and I discovered techno back when it was called European
new beat and the only reason that I discovered it was because I randomly bought a couple of techno CDs and I'm like oh this is good um so I don't that's a I honestly I got to think about that I don't know the answer to that whether it's a random or whether it is like maybe it's back to your razor about Reddit vers Facebook like maybe we subconsciously we're picking the 10 most
obvious or talked about or referenced or whatever stocks right so they were in our short-term memory right and and the reason we picked them was because everyone is talking about him I yeah I you know what I'm I'm gonna I I'm gonna Reserve comment here and that then when I have you back on hopefully you'll have a better razor than I do yeah there's something to be said about the current algorithms keeping
people in a box so obviously there when you kind of randomly do things and you find techno really on I do have concerns around I have this theory that if if you show me someone's YouTube homepage I can get to know them better than I would have done about six months of living with them but I can kind of go okay okay okay and probably predict so much about them the problem with that is is those
algorithms by definition let let me reframe that a lot of those algorithms are based off your past data obviously it's also built off clusters that are similar to you but even then the only way they know those clusters are similar to you Bas the past so does it kind of keep you in this forever Loop that you never break out of that you never find techno and it is this kind of concern of Mind worry of
mind that exists of I'm only going to keep getting the same content or content it thinks I'm like based off the past therefore I'm never evolving and I actually noticed that's fundamentally so so low agency before you page to some extent requiring this algorithm based off your past data to serve you content as it exists now is quite low agency and I found that when I would search content manually when i'
have a bit of agency I'd find new topics new creators that I wouldn't just by random words that would come through I'd find new things that wouldn't exist and i' love to kind of play with that to some extent of how can I have more random content that comes through that's one of the beautiful things I do for with friends that will send me things that will break me out of my SOA bubbles
that I never would have found that specific content without them however we're in this weird point right now of History where the Ford you kind of just keeps you in this version of you yesterday that really really struggles to evolve because of the lack of New Perspectives I do Wonder with um Gro coming through like one of the ideas I've had is when somebody posts particularly anything political that
there's just like a Steelman button and then the AI will just like give a Steelman argument against that and then you can go Steel Man more I wouldn't be surprised if that happens at some point but it is so difficult right now to break out of those filter bubbles because as soon as you log in that explore page of Ran So so many AB tests on you in the past and this optimizing for time on S not personal growth that
it's so difficult so yeah how do we go about getting more Randomness in our schedule is a really difficult task but it's so valuable I think that is absolutely a potentially billion dollar idea because I think you are absolutely right that um basically it's again let's let's do the idiot side of this it's compounding you keep getting the same thing filtered back to you by the algorithm what
happens it compounds and the more you read it the more you like oh I really like this and the algorithm goes oh he really likes this and so gives you the nearest neighbor to that particular thing and that was one of the reasons why I did these kind of random things like some another thing that I would often do is like I would uh I would I would program like a random number generator on my computer and then I
would tie it to an activity and so usually with like if I wanted to read five books I would just say okay I would either close my eyes and pick one of them and and then do it that way but I definitely think if we could come up with a way I'm G to steal this from you because we could commercialize this um if you think of a way that you could introduced a little bit of Randomness in and it's it's kind
of like in AI they call it maximizing the objective function right so what did most of social media maximize the objective function for Revenue right so so what did it give us it gave us all these algorithms to keep you and your eyeballs on the site well what if we change up that and maximize for um Joy maximize for creativity maximize for Discovery uh the algorithms are going to
do what you tell them to do and so if we decide we're going to maximize the objective function for another thing and then include a little bit of Randomness in there like that's that's a great idea I think this is doable and then going back to we have obviously the gold like thing I mentioned earlier with the some version of that I think another version would be I think this will come of the
Steelman thing which I would look whenever I hear it take I just steal on it and there's various versions that that begin to fight back and forth first is getting stuck in that way of thinking and people will say this won't happen because people don't want to pay for social media ads is where it's always and really love advertising however the one thing and need to go deep on the
data here however if you assume that YouTube premium is5 pound a month um Twitter X like $10 or whatever a month the new Facebook one that they've had to bring in is like8 12 pounds per month obviously users will massively vary in terms of their value per platform I.E somebody who's on an Android phone that has no money isn't worth that much versus a billionaire that's on the platform is worth a lot more however
those platforms are kind of openly stating the gay Theory which is if you will pay us $15 or more of a YouTube premium we're going to make more off you than we are from advertising I'm naturally assuming based off that public statement and then all of a sudden you go well if they're offer me this awesome customizable algorithm that's this kale algorithm in the week and then I can go
if I want to go a bit crazy in political on Friday Saturday like I can how much would I pay for that and all of a sudden you you've seen it now with first X doing get charging and if you can then get to the stage where you can customize these algorithms and it makes sense from the game the perspective that the platforms will want to do that because they will get around a lot of the the
politics that comes up of oh you're causing this person to win the election this person to win the election whereas all of a sudden and you you saw it hit a it with ean's grock where it's like you can change it to funny mode why can't we apply that to the algorithm why why can't I say I just want to be educated first thinging on a Monday morning I don't want to see the latest draw in ABC that's here today and onone
tomorrow fundamental thing I've taken from social media as well it's like even if you try and remember a tweet from last week it's really difficult and it does seem to be optimizing for just ultimately things that you'll for getting I think that's a big problem and I'd be very very surprised if we are here five years from now based the game theory that they're only making 10 to 15 pound per user on average monthly anyway
therefore if they can offer an awesome experience $100 a month 100 p a month I think join the Jim would pay multiple FS of that okay so let's do this let's both think about this and and then I'll invite you back on and we'll both we'll compare our answers because I think we're re you are really on to something here I think you're right and I think how cool would that be right uh and
let's just keep it to Twitter right if you could pick an option that is hey uh I I I want I don't want to hear about all the stuff that I'm really interested in or think I'm interested in give me surprise me Delight me uh let you know let's move into funny mode or Delight me mode or any of those kinds of things that's such a great idea and I think like like that's a really big idea that
deserves some time to think about J just before we go if we've got a few minutes I wanted to ask you this question um and i' definitely game for round two one of the things I I see that seems to be very difficult in life is people as they get older keeping their curiosity and their optimism and you're like it's easy to be curious be curious and optimistic when you're 20 it's like being in shape but
as you age it does begin to Decay I'm fascinated by you like there's people like yourself Mark duin Gary V who seem to be getting more Curious and more optimistic with h why is it purely genetic like what have you got going on here that means when I get on the call even though it's like almost 10:30 11: p.m. here I'm ready to run on a treadmill like is it is it something you practice is it something that's just
came and why do you think it decay is for most people yet it seems to have compounded for yourself uh wow that's a great question uh I I think genetics absolutely plays A Part um I've always been incredibly curious um I got in trouble a lot when I was a kid because I was really really curious and I would ask a bunch of questions and and whatnot I think that what happens with many people is is your idea
that you you asserted earlier right when you're a kid 0 to 25 there's so many milestones and they're so different right that oh you know first grade oh now I'm in high school no I'm in college now I'm getting M you know and and then people settle in to you know okay this is my life this is what I do they become habituated to it and that makes them dull and that they they haven't optimized
for uh you know like one another thing I do is I always think I want to learn one new thing today and um what what I find is that it feeds like diving down that rabbit hole is that's the act because what happens is you end up finding so many different things that you are like I never thought about this oh wow I better I better read more about this right and and then it just kind of
takes on a life of its own and it's it's like you're programming yourself in a way right right and and so like I don't know though I mean that's a really tough question that nugget alone I think is a great one of a beautiful video game like can I learn one thing today then that just is a is an easy level to achieve begins to compound it's a clear constraint of like a video game as well
of did or did a wor thing and I think that's great yeah uh well listen this has and as I anticipated I man I like I love talking to you because I just love the way you think and I and and you you managed to distill these things down to just so many useful things that the vast majority again talk about being brilliant being brilliant is being able to take something that might be really complex and whatnot and put it into a
razor that people immediately mediately get and and so I I will definitely be pitching you on uh on you publishing with infinite books because I think we will have a runaway bestseller there um but before we go uh as you might remember from the last time you were on uh you get another crack at being the emperor of the universe uh as before no killing anyone no putting anyone in a
re-education camp but you can I'm going to give you a magic microphone and you can speak into it and you can say two things and all eight billion people on the planet are going to wake up whenever their tomorrow is and they're going to think that they had those two ideas and we're going to change it just for you they are every uh person all eight billion are high agency people and they're going to
act on those two things what are you going to incept in the world's population such a good question the immediate the two things that spring to Mar so off the top of my Dome are one the concept of the forgetting Paradox so you forget how much you forget because you've forgotten it and by definition you don't remember it because you've forgotten it and 99% 9999999 things happen you forget about
you had 10 to 70,000 fors yesterday try remembering or one within that is the is the concept of try and document as much as you can try and store as many things as you can I definitely regret not doing that but I think we're now at this luxury age where you can do that but also to not take a thought too seriously um and then the second thing I probably say is the bug of the video game or the bug
of the OS is to when you try and apply things to yourself it's really difficult even Daniel Canan said that after 30 years right thinking fast and slow and everything he didn't really actually find that useful for days to they like however it's really useful woming observable people so whenever you can shift from first person shooter to third person shooter and I I do that now whenever anybody comes to me with advice
all I basically say is if I came to you with a very very similar situation assuming all my circumstances the same what advice would you give and people already know the answer they don't need any Guru they don't need anybody um if you can apply that I think that tends to work so one you're forgetting more than you forget so you forget more than you forget because by definition you've
forgotten it and you don't realize it because you've forgotten it and you never will um so document as much as you can and the second thing um around view yourself third person character in the video game I think is the ultimate CH code and that alone is the is the midate mean sort left or right just third person shooter baby that's what you need perfect as always this has been
wonderful would love to have you back uh again we'll actually we'll try to figure out I'll figure out a way to capture this idea of you know Delight me mode I I think that we're really on to something there uh and then if you're whenever you're in the states if you're in New York I'd love to get together in real life perfect looking forward to all right thanks so much George you you I love your stuff