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Crypto Scams, Dopamine Websites, Tasteful Slop & Vape Shop Energy - Rabbit Hole #6
Jack Butcher, Shaan Puri and George Mack argue that durable advantage comes from acting, developing taste and building products people value.
Modern Wisdom · Chris Williamson
- Jack Butcher · Founder & conceptual artist, Visualize Value
- Shaan Puri · Co-host, My First Million
- George Mack · Founder & chief ad officer, The Ad Professor
The best minutes
- 1:56Permissionless crypto launches can turn a reputation into bait6 min
- 1:54:10AI assistants can help with tasks people avoid6 min
- 2:00:08Product-market fit keeps customers buying through mistakesPro pick 5 min
Also worth watching
- 12:22Prediction markets let skilled bettors act as the house3 min
- 1:00:22Taste improves when you explain what you like and dislike5 min
- 1:27:21Students can practice AI judgment by comparing model answers4 min
Skip the opening UK–US service and tipping chat, the extended sports-betting and pop-culture tangents, and the political and religious discussion.
Full analysis · 5 min read
Real Alpha · Nov 7
Shaan Puri says a bettor reported basically one percent daily returns
- Shaan Puri said he gave a bettor $1 million, who reported basically one percent returns each day.
- The strategy involved taking the other side of parlays, but the episode gives no timeframe or verification.
- Treat it as a market-structure anecdote, not a return assumption for a budget or board.
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6 sections, the 4 other voices it tests Butcher against, and what it means for you. Every episode we cut gets one.
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A one percent daily return remains an anecdote
Shaan Puri said he gave a bettor $1 million. The bettor said he had basically started producing one percent returns every day.
The described edge was taking the other side of long-shot parlays. Customers paid small stakes for unlikely combinations, while traders supplied the opposing action.
That explains a market role, not a verified return stream. The episode gives no timeframe, audited statements, losses, liquidity limits or independent check.
One percent daily sounds precise, but the account behind it is not. Without duration and drawdowns, the reported rate cannot set a budget or forecast.
Our read
Treat the number as an anecdote about market structure, not a forecast. Anyone assessing a similar opportunity needs the period measured, audited results and downside exposure.
Markets make bets legible and manipulation tempting
The conversation's point is that prediction markets display odds as percentages and a live graph. That makes a position easier to follow, but can also make betting easier to enter.
For example, the group recounted a Paris airport temperature market. Someone supposedly used a lighter or hairdryer to push the reading past its threshold.
A threshold market can become vulnerable when a participant can affect the event being measured. The story illustrates a design problem, not proof of a widespread tactic.
A journalist then received death threats from bettors urging him to describe debris as a missile. The report could affect whether their positions paid.
The conversation raised possible legislation, but supplied no timetable or specific rule. A four-person enforcement discussion, as Chris Williamson described it, leaves open how consistently those rules can be applied.
Our read
Clear odds help users understand a position, while clear incentives can expose sources to pressure. Resolution rules and protections for the people markets depend on are part of the product, not administrative details.
Permissionless launches can turn reputation into bait
The guests described tokens launched around a name, likeness or viral post without permission. The person then faces repeated pressure to endorse or disavow the coin.
A wallet can receive transfers without its owner's approval, making a public association easy to misread. The transfer does not show that the recipient authorized the launch.
The group recalled dog-themed tokens being sent to Vitalik Buterin, who donated the proceeds to an Indian nonprofit. That was an unusual response, not a standard remedy.
Permissionless distribution lowers the cost of launching and of manufacturing apparent association. For a company, a name attached to a token is not consent or evidence of customer demand.
Our read
The same low friction that enables launches also makes false associations cheap. Brands need a clear way to distinguish endorsement from activity they never authorized.
Taste improves when judgment becomes a practice
George Mack opened the taste and slop discussion by questioning how loosely people use both terms. Terms without definitions can signal rank instead of judgment.
George credited Billy Oppenheimer with saving things he likes and explaining why. He added his own companion list for what he dislikes.
Writing reasons down turns preference into criteria that can be revisited. That makes taste more useful than a label someone can apply without explanation.
Jack Butcher defines taste as the ability to distinguish good from not good. He ties slop to missing intention, then says an unexplained slop label is itself unoriginal.
Take Gossip Goblin, the group's example of an AI film built around recognizable archetypes. Its carefully made parody shows that tool choice alone cannot establish carelessness.
Jake Cooper told Knuckle Up with Nakul in October 2026 that Railway tries its own ideas before checking decisions with users. That makes taste a starting hypothesis, not a substitute for market evidence.
Our read
Taste matters when it changes a decision, not when it decorates a critique. A record of preferences can generate hypotheses, while shipping and user feedback test them.
Assistants ease chores but leave reliability unproven
Shaan Puri used a California money search as an assistant demonstration, not a confirmed payment. In his example, it returned a $2,000 amount owed and offered to file a claim.
The distinction matters because an agent's answer is not proof of a completed transaction. The episode gives no confirmation that the example produced a payment.
Shaan also described calendar help and an assistant planning his wife's daughter's birthday party, then checking in afterward. The episode links practical utility to considerate follow-through, not just task execution.
Shaan Puri told the same birthday-party and check-in anecdote on My First Million in September 2026. It is repetition, not independent corroboration.
Jean-Denis Greze told a16z Podcast in October 2026 that adoption depends on showing a useful automation for someone's actual problem. Together, the moments favor onboarding around a real task rather than generic capability.
For classrooms, the group proposed asking students to rank five model answers and explain why. That turns AI output into an object of judgment rather than a shortcut, but the episode gives no evidence of improved retention.
Shaan Puri · My First Million · Sep 30Emotional support may matter as much as AI intelligence
Jean-Denis Greze · a16z Podcast · Oct 19AI adoption depends on showing people what to automate
Our read
The strongest examples remove tedious steps while leaving people able to judge and correct the result. In schools, comparing answers is a more testable idea than treating polished output as proof of learning.
Product-market fit can outlast public mistakes
George Mack described product-market fit as customers returning despite mistakes. His Element example was a thought experiment, not observed customer evidence.
He imagined an insult from the founder followed by another watermelon salt order by Friday. That makes durability behavioral in the story, but hypothetical.
George also recalled advertisers objecting to an iOS change they feared would hurt Facebook ads. He said he saw none give up their iPhones.
The iPhone example is suggestive, but cannot separate product love from switching costs, convenience or ecosystem lock-in. The episode offers no measured retention data.
Alex Danilowicz said on Lightcone in October 2026 that everyone at Magic Patterns handles customer support. Direct exposure gives engineers a route to spot friction before it becomes churn.
Repeat use beats a favorable survey as evidence, but not as diagnosis. Teams should pair reorders with complaints, support patterns and switching costs.
Alex Danilowicz · Lightcone · Oct 22Daily customer support improves design without sacrificing speed
Our read
Durable demand shows up in behavior, but loyalty alone does not explain why customers stay. Track repeat use alongside complaints and the reasons switching may be difficult.
What it means for you
- Audit the return. Before repeating the prediction-market figure, ask for its timeframe, audited results, losses and capital at risk. Separate the trading mechanism from the reported performance.
- Check attribution. Review how your company distinguishes endorsements from unsolicited token launches or payments. Decide how to respond before a false association spreads.
- Test AI learning. Try having learners rank model answers and explain their choices. Measure recall later, not just the quality of the submitted answer.
- Measure repeat use. Track renewals or reorders beside complaints and support requests. Ask whether customers stay because the product works or because switching is difficult.
What to watch
- Whether prediction-market platforms publish clearer resolution rules or safeguards against attempts to influence sources.
- Whether assistant demonstrations turn into verified task completion, with clear permissions and ways to correct mistakes.
- Whether schools assess recall and judgment alongside polished AI output.
Send this to product and finance leaders weighing AI, betting or retention.
Watch the minute where Shaan gives the return figure and explains the strategy.
Written by Real Alpha from the episode's transcript and the other moments it links, then checked against the transcript. Quotes are the speaker's exact words.
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Read it with Pro, 7 days free- 2:06Crypto tokens borrow reputations
Jack Butcher says he was not fully up to speed on Jean Phil, an AI-generated figure whom people initially took to be real. The panel describes coins launched using his likeness, then derivative AI versions and permissionless transfers that let people attach a public figure's name to a token and pressure them to endorse it. They cite Vitalik Buterin's decision to donate unsolicited tokens rather than leave the impression that he endorsed them.
- 12:22Prediction markets make betting legible
Chris Williamson asks whether prediction markets will face regulation. The panel says the markets make bets easier to read as probabilities, while Puri says he thinks 98% of trading volume is sports betting. The group discusses traders taking the other side of long-shot parlays, attempts to manipulate outcomes and threats to a journalist over a market's result.
- 18:38One constraint can dominate
George Mack uses sleep to illustrate how one factor can outweigh many optimizations: he says trying harder to sleep made him more anxious and worsened the problem. Williamson compares this with training, arguing that hard effort matters more than fine-tuning workout details. Butcher shares how an elaborate bedtime routine left him lying awake while his girlfriend fell asleep.
- 25:18Shipping reveals the real competition
Butcher says a buy button gives a product real feedback, while planning can keep founders from learning what the market thinks. Puri recounts a Simon Says game at a Tony Robbins event where most of 5,000 attendees did not believe they would win; he argues that competition thins out as people stop trying. The group also shares examples of people winning contests simply because few others entered.
- 36:42Digital products simulate rewards
The panel describes South Korean sites that let people shop for food or plan trips that will never happen, offering the activity without the purchase. They compare these with imaginary smoke breaks and other deliberately monotonous online experiences. The discussion turns to TV repeating plot details for distracted viewers and to creators who succeed by making either simple, relatable work or exceptionally detailed commentary.
- 45:18Expertise reveals hidden depth
Puri uses Nigel Richards, who won French and Spanish Scrabble championships without speaking those languages, to show how much expertise can hide in a simple game. The panel notes that commercial chicken breeding has narrowed around two leading lines, while Butcher says art's reputation can depend on its reproduction and surrounding story, not only the image. Puri recounts Sydney Frank's marketing of Jägermeister and Grey Goose through positioning, pricing and packaging.
- 1:00:22Taste requires judgment and effort
Mack questions how people use the words taste and slop without defining them, and describes saving examples he likes or dislikes to understand his own judgment. Butcher defines taste as distinguishing good work from bad and says slop describes output made without intention. He points to Gossip Goblin's AI dating-show parody as an example of AI work made with substantial craft.
- 1:14:14Sex and gambling shape products
The panel discusses an essay's argument that digital products often combine sexual content with casino mechanics, and asks what builders should choose to make instead. Butcher says crypto art uses attention-building mechanisms that also appear in traditional art, and believes some crypto works could become highly valuable. He also warns that permissionless markets produce extensive low-quality work.
- 1:19:54Devices need limits and purpose
Puri says he would not give his children social media, but he plays video games with them and believes use should be limited to a suitable dose. Williamson worries that constant distractions and AI shortcuts can make students feel they are learning while retaining less. Puri also questions why education takes as long as it did decades ago and cites Alpha School's claim that students can make two grades of progress in a year with two hours of learning a day.
- 1:31:16AI may change cognitive status
Williamson argues that AI can remove the effort and recall that help people retain material, while the panel distinguishes active retrieval from rereading. They imagine brain gyms as a way to train cognition when fewer jobs demand it, then wonder whether intelligence might lose status if AI does the thinking. The conversation also considers whether visible measures of brain activity could become a new status signal.
- 1:36:03Cultural beliefs are shifting
Mack says moderate left-leaning positions have become less culturally cringe as some right-wing politics feel out of touch. Williamson compares political fashions with renewed interest in religion. Puri shares a poll in which 74% of 3,000 respondents said they believed in God, then describes an account of near-death experiences that frames heaven and hell as reliving how one made others feel.
- 1:47:57Generosity can be practiced
Williamson says leaving an unusually large tip can be a practical way to build a habit of generosity, and tells how he returned late at night before a flight to tip a parking attendant who greeted him daily. Puri describes a friend who gave him $1,000 to spend on others during a trip, which made him think carefully about how to give without making recipients uncomfortable.
- 1:53:59AI assistants can offer care
Puri says he underestimated how useful AI assistants could be in ordinary life. He describes one finding a possible $2,000 refund for his wife and helping with their daughter's birthday party; a follow-up message afterward made her feel cared for. The panel notes that small gestures of encouragement may meet a need that software builders had not focused on.
- 1:59:58Product-market fit survives frustration
Mack says a product has strong product-market fit if customers keep buying even after a founder disappoints or annoys them. He recalls advertisers objecting to Apple's changes to Facebook ads without giving up their iPhones. Puri connects that loyalty to Buffett's view of Apple's brand and switching costs, while the panel discusses how much goodwill a company or public figure can draw on.
Published Oct 26, 2026.
Transcript · 1 h 56 m read
Modern Wisdom, hosted by Chris Williamson, with Jack Butcher, Shaan Puri and George Mack.
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
What were you explaining about how Europe is like Android and America is like iOS? Yeah, yeah. That's great. Let's start with that. Fucking money. It has a lot of better features in many ways, but iOS is just better. It just works. It just works. Even the small one- Pull this sucker in. Not you going forward. You pull it toward you. Oh, we was in- You're doing the same thing. What do you mean, move it towards me? Okay, okay, okay. um sorry it's early um we was in uh sicily which was where the second series of white lotus was filmed and you're at this kind of beautiful extravagant italian restaurants and i flew into new york and we went to one of these kind of flip-up franchise restaurants that are all over america right now like private equity clearly coming blank street coffee yeah and they go you off like three things and it's purely we're going to get customers in and out same ingredients maximize the margins but it's a strange thing about america that uk doesn't have this and europe doesn't have this where you have people on staff that can't serve you where they're like they do the drinks so they pour your drink and i go can i order food as well and they'll be like oh let me get the the person who takes the orders i'm like this is really strange but what's
fascinating the guy that did the waters was in the pe franchised american system was better than any waiter i experienced in the whole of italy so it's just a difference of culture that exists were you expected to tip in an american manner when you were there no all right so you got all of the advantages of american service without the burden of american tipping exactly that sounds like my arbitrage that sounds like my dream but i think i think it's the tipping culture goes a long way i think if you had to actually look at one of the reasons why america is such an entrepreneurial culture is because because of tipping because you have millions of people that They've gaslighted you.
It's these mini entrepreneurs. They've gaslighted you. Well, that's what the word tip means, right? To ensure proper service. And so it's like, it has a function. It was meant to ensure proper service. And so the incentive worked. You're kidding me.
Read the whole transcript
“your crypto wallet, it's like your email address. It's public. People know, they can't take your money, but they can know where to send you money.”
Um, I heard of a professional gambler who his hedge, because in the UK, gambling proceeds are completely tax-free. So there's, uh, like some of the highest, if you look at the highest, um, net worth in the UK, a lot of them, it's like the lady who runs bet three, six, five, but when you're actually a betting company, you pay tax.
So one of the largest tax contributors in the UK is ironically a gambling company, probably a vaping company shortly followed um but if you're actual gambler yourself you don't pay anything on your proceeds and somebody who made a fortune in gambling um he would create a lot of algorithms like almost run like a hedge fund but now because ai's caught up so much he's now going a lot more old school where he will go to the specific sports matches of these semi-pro games and notice who's at the bar drinking or who has certain friendships or who has like little bits of insider information that Claude can't pick up on.
So I wonder if you have this kind of arbitrage pack. Have you seen the, there's like clips of people at like baseball games or whatever with like multiple phones in their hand and they're trying to like catch the result before it gets reported. Yeah, there's a slight delay. Arbitraging time. Yeah, like they have to be, you know, like on millisecond delay to capture that like slight spread. I'm sure there was a little while ago, maybe about five or 10 years ago, there was people in China doing this with football games, soccer games that the amount of time the duration was long enough that you could get a bet in and just arbitrage like i know what's going to happen and the exchange or whatever hasn't caught up to it which is pretty fun it's the human betting equivalent of moving your stock your trading company closer down manhattan towards where the actual exchange is yeah there's a good there was a good uh uh instance of this like right when the polymarket stuff came out originally for weather and you could bet on like the temperature in Paris today.
Didn't some guy use a hairdryer? Yes. Do you see this? No, no, no. The bet was- It's like CCTV footage of it. It's great. Will the temperature in Paris- Like at Charles de Gaulle Airport. At Charles de Gaulle Airport, break 20 degrees or 21 degrees Celsius, and supposedly someone went in with a lighter or a hairdryer, blew it. And if you look at the actual temperature, it just goes flat, flat, flat, flat, peaks, breaks 20 degrees, comes back down again, market closed wow so you are we are moving back into the real world like what cannot be manipulated by a computer what is like more yeah what's outside the basically the grasp the purview the territory purview of of ai now and like people are trying to almost like reverse engineer like pastoralism in some sort of a way like i can't you can't influence the size of my watermelons this summer or something like that you know wow is there a thing around um when you're kind of being reflexive with polymarket and doing things like that is it legal is it illegal is it still very early days yet that they haven't quite figured it out good question it is i think they like have to honor these and then they update their because it's not like the law it's like
how polymarket will resolve the bet and they have some rules on how they're going to resolve the bet if you play within that they they are supposed to honor it now they might they might try not to and say, come, you know, you can sue us if you want the money, but, um, it's not illegal to do that. They've got like a, whatever, uh, enforcement and safety team or an enforcement and fairness team. I watched a documentary about Polymarket and Kalshi. And to be fair, they managed to get both of the CEOs on and they were talking about how it works and is it predatory and so on and so forth. Is it encouraging gambling? And it does cut to the enforcement and fairness team or whatever. And it's just four blokes sat around computers discussing whether or not like, so this hairdryer thing that happened. Do we think that that's fair? It's like garage ethics. It's like pub table philosophy debate, but with potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line for people. There was that journalist who had said that a piece of debris that had landed in a Middle Eastern country was from a drone, not from a missile. And he started getting death threats from people who had made bets on polymarket saying that a missile would land on
this particular day saying you need to change the story so that you say that it was a missile because if you do the market's going to close out in our favor but if you don't then we've lost all of this money so the incentives now
“So I gave this guy a million dollars and he said he basically started producing 1% returns every day.”
takeoff of prediction markets is like how legible they made betting like split it into two percentage Like when we're growing up, you look at life to one. Oh, well, it's 13 to two. This horse is going to win this. This game is going to have a goal in this minute. It's going to be this. And this is just like, show me a fucking graph. And it's a market that you have a position in, in real time. And I think like maybe 10 years ago, these like growing up in the UK, betting is just like, it was around, like, there's a betting shop on every corner before every shithouse village has on America is like, yeah, we're like, we're like, we're like, we're married and we're like, wow, we you can have sex. It's like giving alcohol to the Native Americans. It is. Yeah. Yeah. Totally evolutionarily novel stimulus. I do. I do think there's a place for a hedge fund that just uses polymarket and cal sheet and just shorts America in international sports. Because like, do you remember in the World Cup when the USA was playing Belgium and you could tell like, no, Americans don't really give a shit about soccer, but because the World Cup was a thing, they'd get into it.
And it's like, Belgium has Courtois in goal as one of the best goalkeepers of all time. Kevin De Bruyne in attacking midfield is one of the best players of all time. And America with like 63%. It's like, this is, that is like naïve. So you're saying you need to bet against like national pride. I think I could become George Soros by just looking at any sport that America isn't good at, just looking at them betting against it. Because they've got such blue sky vision. America's are delusionally optimistic. What's your line that the British affliction is cynicism and the american affliction is bullshit yes like you can just bet against the bullshit yes and then yeah or if an american says how well their business is doing probably half the revenue buy about that but if a brit says how badly it's doing probably think it's about twice as good as they say it's a good rule of thumb did you see the um the nfl controversy the hypocrisy that just happened uh like the like the cat dallas cowboys player he scores a touchdown and his celebration was he took the football and he kind of made it look like he's shotgunning a beer. So they clamped down and they fined him, you know, whatever, $30,000 or whatever it is. For the celebration.
For the celebration. And people on Twitter are like, I can't, I'm so glad they did this. I can't believe they're going to promote this on the NFL brought to you by DraftKings. They showed this on the Bud Light Jumbotron and there's children in the audience. And then literally as the guy was giving the press conference, like apologizing the background of the step and repeat banner is bud light as the presenting sponsor of the dallas cow It's this weird blend of complete libertarian market freedom and puritanism, these two things coming together. It really is. It's just young. It's just what happens when you're a teenage country, which is sort of what America is. And it's like, oh, yeah, maybe I should get a tattoo. I should get an eyebrow piercing. An eyebrow piercing would be cool. We should make a guy from reality TV the present wouldn't that be sick right this is american pie like the american american pie yeah yeah it is um to go back to jack's point around the numbers um just changing it the impact it has but also just uh the you know the russell conjugation idea of um chris sweats jack glows sean perspires and you've said the same thing but it sounds great for jack and not as good for you
too and it feels that winnie the pooh meme which was the winnie the pooh meme you know where he's like with the monocle in the bottom and he's like yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i have a paper round i do media distribution yes yes betting uh betting exchange prediction market yeah exactly oh you've gone from like basement sofa masturbator to quant refined it's the mayo aioli rebrand like you know i can't believe that they pulled this off the sports betting to prediction yes what have you got G you've been we haven't been together for two months basically yeah I know so we have this idea of uh blue brain which is similar to being blue balls but it's when you and your friend haven't been together for long enough that you've accumulated loads of shit that you want to talk about so what have you been blue braining me with a little question actually question and I can kind of talk through one of my answers for it but one of the things I was thinking about is what is a power law in a thing that if you neglect it everything else is irrelevant what is a power law yeah so like for example i'll give you my realization was um went through the whole classic arc eight years ago when the whole big big sleep came on the scene around the average person is
significantly underslept and all the matthew walker revolution yeah the and i think the peak of it was when um matthew walker did like the eight part series on sleep with huberman and i joke that my friend uh quinney who's like never overthinks anything after four beers um just saying just shut your eyes lad will sleep better than anybody who listens to that podcast and the power law and i think matthew and human probably actually agree that the I'm sorry. power law I took from sleep was all the other stuff like, um, temperature control, um, wind down routines is ultimately the first thing is the more you try to sleep, the worse you will sleep.
And therefore anything else that stacks on top of that without taking that serious is completely wiped out. So the, the, if you don't take that serious or anything that you do after that canceled it out. And I think a lot about that power law that was like, oh, sometimes in life, you've got to think about, it's a little bit the Midwip meme, but the power law wipes everything else out. If you get this one thing right, or if you get this one thing wrong, everything else becomes irrelevant. And lots of people, there's this whole trend right now that people have gone down the hole trying to improve their sleep and ironically ended up with insomnia, which is like trying to improve your margin by 10% and you've gone bankrupt. It's like you've gone backwards.
It's like a lot of people that have got into this sleep science stuff have actually gone backwards because what they'll do is they'll have, and this is what happened to me is I'll think that I had one night where I slept eight hours and I felt great. And I go, oh, I'm a person that sleeps eight hours. And it's like, no, the previous night I slept five and then I slept eight that night to overcompensate. So I felt great. Now I started having this meme in my head that I need to sleep eight hours per night. So I'd then go, right, if I need to be up at six, I'll go to bed at 10 and I'll get into bed awake, which is the single worst thing you can do for your sleep to just lie there and go, why am I not going to sleep yet? Why am I not going to sleep yet? And then you end up waking up, I know you've had this at times, when you wake up at 3am, and then you'll be ruminating about this whole sleep thing. And it's just like this absolute doom because you've neglected the power law. Tell me if this sounds familiar. You train regularly, you eat reasonably well, you feel fine, but you're just kind of going off vibes. Most people have absolutely no idea what's going on inside their body. And that is why I partnered with Function. Function gives you access to more
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That's functionhealth.com slash modernwisdom. Me and you have been through the ringer when it comes to sleep. An equivalent that I, the first one that comes to mind for me is around training, which is that you can try to optimize absolutely everything. But ultimately, if you're not training hard, everything else doesn't matter. You can have the perfect sets, reps, form, the right amount of protein consumption. but ultimately you need to stress the system and the best way to work out if you're stressing the system is whether or not it is stressful i is it hard uh so i trained with sam sulik do you know that guy is i fucking jacked 24 25 year old guy just got married like animal all he does is train hard his one criteria for when he's in the gym is like did i fuck myself up and you could argue Maybe he swung a little bit far on the non-science-based way, but he has a physique that is suggestive that training hard is pretty fucking good as long as you can recover from it.
So, yeah, one of the ones that I would think is you can optimize your intra-workout protein window with pre-digested whey and the right amount of maltodextrin to shuttle the carbs into the muscle and all the rest of it. But, like, if you didn't train hard, if there weren't a few sets in there where you felt like, oh, fuck, like, I really don't know if I can get through this, everything else kind of doesn't matter. And you can probably fix a lot. You can also paper over a lot of cracks, which is the same. Like if you just don't stress about sleep and have like a principle of, I should probably be in bed for around about eight hours ish, cold, dark, quiet, if I can, whatever. If you don't stress about sleep, your sleep is probably good. Like if you don't stress about all of the other macronutrient adjacent things and you just work on training hard, you'll cover more of the bases than maybe any other one thing. So that would be something that I think is kind of similar.
jack have you heard his uh his blue light glasses sleep story where you're please take it from the top take it from the top incredible story this is um have you heard this this is like this is a few years ago so when i'm like peak okay oh so i can i can become the best sleeper in the world right so like this is peak optimization window like six years ago and so i've gone like right well if i just start stacking more i'm gonna sleep even better so i've got like the full-on nonce red light glasses on i've got the wind down routine of like no stimulation before bed i've got all my magnesium l-theanine shit that i'm taking um and this This is with my ex-girlfriend, lovey girl. I think I'm brushing my teeth in the dark like that.
She obviously whistles in, hits the lights in the bathroom. I'm blinded like that. Why have you done that? Then I'm laying in bed five minutes later. She's already asleep. I'm just laying there seething. I go, oh, midwit meme. Yeah. A hundred percent. My, my, my answer was going to be basically the same as Chris's, but in a different world is like the planning versus the doing in any like commercial endeavor, right? Where you're sitting down making notes about what people are going to like, like what line are people going to respond to? How they, it's like, just ship the thing and then see the market will tell you immediately what it thinks. And you can get stuck in that loop forever. One of my favorite tweets of my own, but in the last few weeks, I love citing myself.
this is well this is many years of pain condensed into one sentence it's like if you want real feedback add a buy button oh so great what's that line that was actually a pretty good tweet thank you very much second only to uh moving from theory to practice will always cost you status it's another one of yours yeah i like that one to the uh just the this and it's referring to the same thing where it's like okay i'm i can have this like beautiful architected idea or theory on paper or and even made even worse now by your $20 a month super intelligence collaborator that's telling you everything you do is phenomenal you know sent from the divine you're you're a genius and then you put it out as crickets and the only thing that gives you like any kind of information to improve it is putting it out and getting crickets or getting you know whatever kind of feedback you get and uh yeah midwit meme actually made a midwit meme maybe it was probably back in probably five years ago which is the um you know do a risk assessment like convene with everybody on your team and talk about this this and this and it's like just post the thing just post the thing on either side and uh it remains true to this day same idea as just
go to the gym market doesn't lie dead what's yours do you have any uh well i have a health one that was like a real a lived example uh i was at a conference and like they had like a lunch break so we're sitting at a table it's me and this guy i know and both of us had been trying to lose weight and we were talking about how's it going oh you look great you know and i'm like yeah i'm not so bad myself did a little progress and people were like Like, oh, so what do you do? And now it's basically like a scene from Silicon Valley. It's like the stupidest trope we fell into where he's talking about how he bought a DEXA machine.
Like he bought his own DEXA scanner for like whatever, six grand or 16 grand, whatever it is. I'm not sure for what, but he's like, yeah, I bought that and I did this and I do this and I'm taking this peptide, I'm doing this thing and this. And so he's like talking about it. I'm like, yeah, well, you know, but the thing about DEXA is, and I'm like, it's not as accurate as doing this other thing. so we're both talking and we talked for like 42 minutes and then like lunch is 45 minutes last three minutes uh i look over and there's this very fit guy who's just been sitting at the corner he's like you know one of the guy's girlfriends and it's like spencer what do you do he's like um you know i love surfing so i just surf like a lot i surf all the time it's really fun and it just keeps hearing pretty good shape and i was like oh shit we just midwitted all over this table i apologize about the dexa and all these other things we're talking about it's like wait it's probably as simple as, you know, find an activity like surfing that you love, and you're going to have a great time and be in great shape by default. And like, shut up. All the other stuff, just shut up about it. My dad had a good one growing up, all the gear and no idea. You ever
heard that one? Yeah, of course. Yeah. But it's all of the idea and none of the action. As Luke, my co-founder of Nutonic says, all fart, no poo. More accessible version. Timeless wisdom. It's all fart, no poo. Mark, have you got that diagram? So I don't know whether you made this, but that idea that you're talking about i did i came across this this morning is it did you make this yeah can you take us through that this is one of the best things i've ever seen and i loved it being resurfaced i'll tell you the story of this i'm at a tony robbins event and on day two tony doesn't perform anymore which i didn't know so you go to tony robbins he does day one you're it's amazing you show up for day two they're like by the way tony's been doing this for 40 years his vocal cords are shredded he just did 15 hours on stage yesterday so he takes the second day off he comes back the third day so this other guy gets up there and he does like a warm-up game so he's like we're gonna play simon says and like as if being at a tony robbins self-help seminar was not already like you know humiliating enough now we're playing simon says with 5 000 people in an auditorium but you know i'm at the event so let's play along so you say you stand up so everybody
stands up and he starts playing simon says and i like part of me is just like this is kind of stupid but let me give it a shot i um so within five minutes the game is over which is kind of amazing out of 5 000 people like the game ends very quickly there's like four people left at the end and he calls them up on stage and i'm like dude we don't need to hear their victory speech it was simon says it's no big deal and he he brought up a very interesting point he goes uh okay you guys won he goes let me ask you a question for the people in the crowd when i said we're gonna play simon says and you looked around saw 5 000 people stand up how many of you believed you were going to win simon says and he's like stay standing if you believed you were going to win and already like 80 90 percent of the people sat down like we just we didn't we didn't care we didn't think it just seemed unlikely and so he goes um these four people were only competing against these 32 people he's like so you know and when i saw that i was like wow that's actually a pretty good parallel for life so i wrote this blog post much later which is in any endeavor let's say there's you know a thousand people the first half too afraid to try they won't put the buy button on the tweet because they don't
want to find out the answer they don't want to pay that price of status for going and doing Then you have the people who are the dabblers. They'll give up within three attempts. And they'll say, we tried it, it doesn't work. And so they'll tell you a great story. Then you have the people that are doing it, but they're moving so slowly, they've effectively lost all momentum. You got the people at the end who get distracted by a shiny object. And then finally it's you and one other dude. At the end, and like competition, the idea that the world is so saturated, so competitive, like people get, you get fed this idea.
I just don't actually believe it's true. And like Charlie Munger has this phrase, which he says take a simple idea and take it seriously and it is shocking how few people will take a simple idea and take it seriously like i would say your career slash instagram account is what like you literally take one idea you started off with like naval said some dope shit let me just try to make a black and white dots and lines like you know like pen and paper drawing of that idea but you took it seriously you did it better than anyone else would do it and like suddenly you did it first you moved quick enough to do it first too it might have felt that way i bet there's other people like that were quoting him repackaging him but you did it differently and you're talented i'm not trying to take away from that but like my point is you can get so far ahead with a very simple idea change the direction of your life you know in a way and you have a million followers and all these great things but everybody would tell you it's too noisy too complicated podcasting is so competitive right like it's all so competitive everything's so competitive It's like, well, it's not really when you realize the distribution of attitudes in the human population.
I know a guy won a surfboard off a Sprite can when we were in high school. It's like the beginning of a J from the in-betweeners. He was the only person who sent in. No way. I have a friend who did exactly this. Every can of Sprite for six months or however long they run a campaign in the UK. One bloke. And he's like, I can't believe I won. And whoever they're like marketing, I was like, yeah, you're the only person who sent in. My buddy Dan in college did this. He would always, he won like six or seven things. You know, the sandwich shop Spicy Pickle. They have a mascot. Guess who won the mascot naming contest?
Dan won it. He named him Spicy Pickle. It's a spy themed pickle. he wins lifetime supply of spicy pickle he won a lifetime supply of stride gum he was like hey let's go audition for prices right right now and then we went we both got casted on the show and it's unbelievable like most people just aren't even trying to do any of these things and he just believed in himself enough to like shoot a shot like he just shoots a shot like you know more often than anyone else and i can name six of the wins he's probably done a thousand others that i don't even know about but he just he tries because he i don't know he didn't really overthink it he just does it but i think it's because nobody else is even doing isn't that great like doesn't that just make accessing success and cool shit in life feel so much more within reach well because the the uh devil's advocate position or the alternative that i think sean's going against is it'll be the classic statistic approach of well actually 90 percent of businesses go bust in the first year and it's like yeah because they did it for a week or it's only when you actually zoom into the statistics whenever you have like vague statistics but you actually zoom in um it reveals a lot more
and you it's that teal idea of um you're not a lottery ticket yeah like it's not just an evenly distributed just based off a random chance there is some form of control that's going on in the same way as if bill gates walks into a football stadium everyone on average becomes a millionaire nice this is the failure equivalent of that right around i think you misattributed a great quote to me once about uh podcasts like how many podcasts you need to do to be in the top one percent okay i read it on reddit somewhere and i think i told you and then i've thanked i think i get tagged i get tagged as the inspired millions yeah yeah 90 of podcasts don't make it past episode three and of the 10 that do 90 of those don't make it past episode 20 so by doing 21 podcasts during the top percentile of all podcasters ever quote jack butcher quote Wayne Gretzky Chris Williamson quote Jack Butcher quote Reddit It's inspired a lot of people to start podcasts It's a human centipede but the guy at the front is no one knows who he is It's like that quote around Albert Einstein, what compound interest is, what, the seventh one, eighth one of the world, sorry.
And it's then pointed out- The seventh is Niagara Falls or something. Yeah. It's then pointed out that Einstein didn't actually say that. It's in zero to one. Einstein didn't actually say that, but Einstein's brand is so powerful that even posthumously he's getting random quotes given to him. This is Churchillian drift. Churchillian drift is great. Overtime quotes that don't get attributed to anyone get attributed to Churchill or Einstein. What you want, I think the ultimate version of great brand for anybody that's supposed to be like a public smart person is to have such gravitas that unattributed quotes get assumed.
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Have you guys done any non-shopping lately? Have you done any never arrive shopping? I heard about that. websites yeah these are crazy have you seen this okay we've all seen it maybe i haven't seen it in action i haven't seen it and i've heard about it so i went and actually used it uh it's surprisingly a little less i think there's room for improvement in this but the concept is basically what porn did for sex the south freeans have figured out to do for everything else and so they're doing it for shopping they've already got a birth rate so low that sex is pointless well like this so basically they have these food delivery apps where you can go and you can order so this is food never comes you go and you install the app so i had i had the app and i went and i started shopping at all these restaurants that don't exist and i started picking dishes that I'm never going to eat.
Jesus Christ, there's pop-ups. And then I've got Chrome extension. I paid for expedited shipping for a product that's never going to ship. And then at the end of the day, I got the satisfaction of shopping without ever having to pay a cent. Did you though? The makers of Food Never Comes have now released like the like travel never comes or something like that. It's basically like- You can shop for a holiday that you're never going to go on. Yeah, so you plan a vacation. That doesn't cost you a cent because you're not going to go on it. And this is actually apparently quite popular trip never leaves it's at the top yeah trip never leaves skip the airport i would way rather have a shopify store that's just going up so i look at it i've made five million today and then i'm getting offers from like private equity yeah business there was a there was a app where a live stream one yeah that's crazy have you seen that where you can like it's a simulate a live stream you go live but you're like speed where your chat is going nuts the hearts are flying guys have use this to pull chicks in clubs right exactly yeah that's fucking crazy there's another one i think it was south korea as well where you could go for a smoke break an imaginary smoke
break with co-workers but you didn't smoke and you didn't have co-workers so what did you do exactly like what it was to do it was fake smoke breaking like you just went out to whatever the local like the gangway out front and got to hang out it was like a break from your own life but you were doing it on the internet there's a few of these come out like video games that people have built with the new tools that make it easy for anybody to make a video game or easy i shouldn't say that but more accessible where there's like monotony built into this stuff and there's like there's one watching paint dry was one of them like getting needles out of a haystack from the haystack was another one where like literally one by one waiting through this thing forever or like there was a nine to five simulator i saw as well what did you do when you were younger i mean i was talking to someone about this the other day it's like the dopamine like the speed of dopamine on the computer games that we grew up on versus now it's like i used to play runescape when i was a kid it's just like click click like you sit there for hours and like the input output was so low bandwidth compared to like a fortnight or something right that you like in comparison
that's like meditation now we were having this conversation about the amount transcendental runescape we were talking about um the exposition the increased exposition that's needed in tv shows Now, what was the word that was used? It's not exposition. Piloting. Piloting. It's called piloting. Okay, so it's really important. We need to make sure that we've got the rock salt in the shotgun. You've got it right? Cool. Okay. Three minutes later, they're about to go into the bank and it's like, don't forget the rock salt in the shotgun. And then the rock salt in the shotgun becomes a pivotable part because someone forgot to do it and then they kill someone or whatever.
But you need to continually restate the premise because people are double screening or they're not paying attention quite so much and the same thing's true i think that there's a study mark see if we can chat gpt this might be out outside of its realm but go big dick pro um what are the number of cuts in each fast and furious movie and i'm sure that the total volume of cuts has gone up over time so it's like the big mac index of attention it's like fast and furious is the perfect index of people's attention because it'll it'll be around forever it's been what was the fast and furious 20 years ago 15 years ago had to be 20 yeah and then it was just two guys drag strip racing and now they're firing cars off ramps into helicopters that you know faster and furious more fast and more furious yeah exactly and more racially diverse as well which i think is important this may take a little bit of time have you seen the guy who's building his empire off of fast and furious deep cuts the guy on instagram who basically he's just a sommelier of fast and furious so he'll be like incredible he's just sitting and he's complete his character's amazing he's so deadpan he'll be like top five uh key tosses in fast and furious let's take it from the
top vin classic left hand toss no look catch number four we have this take a simple idea but he's doing it on every minor thing that could happen didn't you do one about like best beer chinks or something yeah exactly corona corona swings in fast and furious and he's exploding let's get him up let's make him i mean i binged his stuff i was like this is honestly like you gotta get niche you gotta get niche with that it's incredible anyone that loves anything that much yeah or is that good at anything there's these dudes called crown cinema the o is missing and they do the most obsessive deep dives into movies it's a little bit more expertise it's not like flipping around something that's kind of a bit silly but the most incredible breakdowns of uh like Shutter Island or Inception and like the best explanation of a million things that you didn't notice even if someone's like yeah I got Inception's one of my favorite movies I get it like Christopher Nolan's a bit of a genius or whatever and you go oh I was I thought I was at level four I'm actually at level one and a half and there's all of this shit below and they're so great but this is your theory that uh content on the internet now needs to be either one end of the
barbell like completely simple it's a hang with the boys or it's the best the absolute best and there'll always be room for better yes but there'll always be room for more relatable and the middle all of the stuff in the middle is where you go yeah it's where you go to die have you seen those two lads that do the commentator overlays like they there's they're like it's like breaking the fourth wall they'll show the sports clip one top at the top of the screen and then the two of them they'll film themselves as if they were the commentators announcing that part of the game you haven't seen this no okay if you can find it it is weird and you're coasting off this thing that people have already seen that is like you know has this so much cultural relevance and power and then they like put their own layer pre-tested content it's like reaction videos you know like a new song comes out you like somebody's take on it it feels like where things are just their enthusiasm that just draws you in again did you guys see this guy speaking of like somebody else's obsession and passion even if you have zero interest in the subject sucks you in and you guys see the the number one scrabble guy in the world no no oh my god i watched this like 30 minute
documentary on youtube about this guy and i don't care about scrabble did you find it yeah it's called shep mates s-h-e-p yeah shep mates oh god they really they've got dressed as well they've put the woolen i think you boys are gonna love this okay all right oh they're like legit good yeah the guy in the background's the best who's like Kicks it back towards the ring In front Franklin Knocked away by Morris May Smith Sold the team Making the trouble Quick pinking by Kennedy And Franklin was run down Tom Boyd's got it Tom Boyd goes long How will it bounce The stadium holds its grip It's a goal And the Western Suburbs Corrupts They haven't got any pinned ones But go down They're voiceovering it So it's not them doing it themselves So they're like remembering This is Australia There's layers of inception going on.
You keep nostalgia associated. Try and find like a World Cup one or something. That looks pretty good. It's not even in their own language. Language. There's so much work they put in. The old one eye. They just got infinite, infinite at supply of stuff that is really great arbitrage every all all success is arbitrage isn't it in one form or another it's so good um but this i gotta tell you about the scrabble guys unbelievable story so the claim is this this guy is better at scrabble than anyone is at any game compared to their peers so the gap between him and everybody else is bigger than magnus and everybody in chess jordan and everyone in basketball and so if you watch this thing story is crazy this guy and doesn't play Scrabble until he's 28 years old.
And now he's, like, you know, world champion so many times over. But not only is he the world champion in, like, U.S. Scrabble, he then won the U.K. championship, which is, like, oddly has 50,000 words difference that you can't use and you can use. Wow. Then they were like, okay, great. You're just the best at Scrabble. No big deal. So he goes and he wins the Spanish and French also, despite not knowing how to speak the language. He is literally, like, such a mental dictionary that he studied the language and he can beat the best players from those countries who've been playing since they were children and are fluent in that language and he defeats all of them.
And so he won it in France. He couldn't even, at the acceptance speech, he couldn't say like, thank you so much. So he's like, can you just tell them thank you? But he just dominated the competition and you could see all these guys their whole life they've been playing and it's like the guy who lost to AI in Go and they were just like, my life is meaningless. This guy's like Ben's kid. with math but for scrabble he's a fucking savant you should put up a picture he looks exactly like you would expect as well nigel richards yeah this guy and so like his first tournament he rode his bike 222 miles to get to it one and then came like rode home unbelievable and the clips i'm watching clips and they're like all right he gets these letters and they're like chd oh he's gonna be able to play children that's gonna be a very nice score we're excited about children and then And they're like, he's pausing.
Why is he pausing? What could he be thinking? Nigel, what do you have up your sleeve? And then he'll go, chlorodyne. And they're like, don't. And they're like, lose their mind. I love looking at anything that exists and you think it's shallow. And as soon as you meet somebody who's an expert, you go, there's depth. So even Scrabble, even Scrabble, I never thought they'd be this level at Scrabble. Even wooden tables, there'll be a person out there in the world that could talk about wooden tables for a depth that you've never discovered i saw the thing recently have you seen the thing around the two types of chicken you see this yes yes there's basically every single chicken on the planet is one of two yeah yeah so again i've been eating chicken my entire life i've never thought that deeply about it but it's but i just literally pulled it up then you sleep for you yeah um in uh basically there's dozens of breeders of different types of chicken and it's shrunken all the way down to Cobb Vantras, owned by Tyson, and Avergen, owned by German's EU group. Their flagship products, the Cobb 500 and the Ross 308. And we basically got rid of all of the different variations of chicken. I assume it's kind of like-
Genetically, there's only two chickens. It's almost like there's only Poodle and Rokweiler. We've kind of slowly, because these chickens, however, it's to do with the fatness and how we eat them. And the amount of these chickens, the line was something around if um oh these are two yeah this is the cob 500 yeah i'm a massive fan of the cob 500 yeah yeah i'm a big cob 500 guy but uh yeah how quickly they grow somebody was saying that if you was to just look at the um kind of biodiversity of earth as an alien you just see the number of chicken skulls because we're getting through millions of the sorry trillions of these carb 500s a year if you're going to spend an hour in the gym you might as well look hot and feel comfortable while you're doing it. And honestly, who wants to be in the background of a TikTokers highlight reel dressed like a chump? Gymshark makes some of the best men's and women's training gear on the planet. And something that I realized a few years ago is that when you actually like what you're wearing in the gym, you show up differently, you train harder, you stay longer and get way more high fives. The hybrid shorts are my go-to.
They are the perfect length, super lightweight, easy to wash and dry. And they're sleeveless t-shirts that I've trained in every day for basically the last decade. They're the ideal fit they're breathable they hold their shape perfectly no more looking like adam sandler's your stylist basically everything they make is unbelievably well designed you already know about them they're high quality you get 30 days of free returns globally with global shipping and a 10% discount site-wide. So get that 10% discount by going to the link in the description below or heading to gym.sh slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom10 at checkout. That's gym.sh slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom10 at checkout. Where I thought this, I was walking to the gym the other day and there was a ton of birds sat on a lamppost. Lots of birds. Where are all of the dead animals that's a great question where because there's loads of animals that i see that are alive and almost none that i see that are dead but the dead ones have to go the live ones end up dead somehow like where are all the vultures then that are eating them right like okay so foxes okay but foxes eating the skulls of squirrels yeah where's all the squirrel skulls i think they just like a
python i've got an instagram page i think they just i think they just don't they they're not like he's a knife and fork. They just house the whole animal? But it's... I can't tell if you're just saying it confidently or you know the answer. I mean, it must be. Yeah, it's not like a service. Surely it's this. Okay. But my dog, okay. My dog will like, if it found a carcass in the garden, it's just going to eat it. It's gone. Yeah. And like feral animals will definitely do that. But I don't see... What I love though, and you can do this. Raccoon. There will be a guy or a woman out there who's spent 20,000 hours around animal decomposition and they'll be the person of scrabble for this and i love i told chris this one before but whenever i meet somebody who's an expert in any industry of i'll often come at them with my questions of like so what's happening here and they kind of answer my layman shit but my favorite question now is to just go what's the most fascinating thing that people like me don't appreciate but keeps like you think is the most intriguing thing and it's like a fucking whole such a banger it's such a banger question what do you think about that for like art that like layman's like me chris or sean don't really think about but is actually really intriguing to
people in the industry well my particular strand of art that happens on the internet primarily i think some of the some of the stuff that's underappreciated that about that is like the mechanisms underneath the images so like this is not going to be interesting to anyone listening probably that has no like inherent interest in this but the um the idea that so much of our history is actually about like what happened around the art versus the art itself. Like why is the Mona Lisa incredibly famous? It was stolen a bunch of times. And there's like all of this like cultural law around these pieces. Another thing, uh, another great one is the, the last supper. Like why is the last supper, one of the most famous images in the world? Is it because it's an amazing image and it depicts this like piece of Western culture that everybody refers to as like, you know, an inception moment, or is it because the printing infrastructure at the time, the, the aspect ratio of it was perfect to reproduce that. And it's that like, that's, that's like one of the biggest contributing factors to why that image is so, uh, like notorious because it could be reproduced at scale because of the vast majority of printers were operated in that aspect ratio. So it's like, it's always something
like, you know, you misattribute the, the, the, the significance of something to like, it's be careful how i say this like it's inherent value versus like story the environment around it that produced the story i just read this thing this morning it was like you've seen this like new biological uh breakthrough or research around like if you put a sorry if you put an old heart into a young body it gets younger the organ gets younger and like the macro observation there is like the environment is more important than the single variable and it sort of reminds me of that It's like all the story and the law and like the great artists in the world today and previously, either you like manufacture the narrative yourself while you're alive or something amazing happens.
And then you are like attributed, you know, history, what was it? Like the winner writes this story or the history. History is written by winners. And so many artists' careers are defined by like amazing storytellers and like stewards of their work where they've been able to. what the senra did an amazing readout of a biography of um the guy that inspired um i forget it's like huge art dealer today but there was like an art dealer of a previous generation who like rent these mansions in england put paintings up on the walls and then bring like a vanderbilt and like a competing business person of that era and then have them like see each other in the driveway and then he can come in and be like uh yeah no he's he's pretty interested and he said he's going to go back and just get the money together and it's like oh i have to have it now You know, it's like the mimetic games that people have been able to build.
We did that in nightclubs. If we had the two biggest tables, if you go into a nightclub, there will be one table typically, which is only available. It's usually behind the DJ booth. It's the most expensive table in a club, classic super club Vegas style thing. Maybe it's even above the DJ booth in an area that's only accessible through security and stuff like that. And that's where Dana White is on New Year's Eve having a scrap of his wife or whatever. And then there's a couple of other tables that are kind of the top middle ones, which they will always be opposite another table. And that's where you put the guys that are the ones that have actually got the small man syndrome.
And you put them opposite each other. One gets a bottle delivery service, which is 15 grand. And then the other ones are like, they got the one with the motorcycle. They get the one where the guy comes out on the motorcycle and they go, well, I mean, in fact, the one that's 20 grand, you get like, they dress up as nuns and they come out as that. And it's like, get the fucking nun one, dude. And then they're like, yo, they just dogged us on that thing. Like, get the, and you just, it's an auction bidding service for attention inside of a nightclub and you leave the number of times that we left events three in the morning lights come up everyone fucks off and you look at the table and there's unopened bottles of champagne there's bottles of vodka that nebuchadnezzar's four and a half liter six liter bottles of stuff and you're like they've had a tenth of this and by the way very very high uh expenditure bottles of liquor and champagne the most expensive part of it is the bottle, not the contents of the bottle. Like, it is much more expensive to produce the glass that that goes into, because it's such a low volume, and it's so thick, and it's so da-da-da-da, and they're consuming just this tiny, tiny amount of it.
Mimetic tax. Yeah, it is. It is. It's small man tax. Damn. That's kind of the story of Grey Goose. Do you guys know this backstory of Grey Goose? uh the the guy who started gray goose is such a legend he um he first uh popularized uh jägermeister but the like it basically all started because of a like fight in the family so i think like he married this woman she's great her father was in the spirits business and then they have a falling out and he basically gets kicked out of the family business but in a sort of memetic rivalry with the father he decides like not only will i be successful i will be successful in the spirits business so he's walking around town he's thinking like what's the entryway like i have no experience no contacts like pretty competitive saturated market what am i gonna do and he sees this like german group of uh you know older people and they were drinking something in like a small thing like a little tiny shot glass but they're like sipping it he's what is this and they were like oh it's a jagermeister it's a sort of aperitif it's like an after dinner like sort of thing that you sip on and it's like it's almost like tastes medicinal if you you know had jagger and so he he goes and starts reading about it and he's like okay uh no good news is
bad news is it tastes bad and nobody really cares about an app after dinner sipping you know liquor he's like but the good news is the rights are available because nobody wants this afternoon thing so he gets the rights to it and he realizes like i have to create the story around this so he's like he gives it to some people to taste it he's like you know this liquor has some pretty special properties can you figure out what they are like i'm curious and he just lets people just brainstorm what it might be and someone's like i think this is kind of like an aphrodisiac they come back and he's like sure is so he starts he starts promoting it that way so he goes to bars he's like oh it's for young people so he goes to like college towns and then he's like it's aphrodisiac he starts putting like newspaper clippings in the urinals that are like banned aphrodisiac from europe makes its way to the u.s parents warn of its effectiveness whatever you know doctors swear that this happens and then he starts hiring like hot nurses to like inject like like shoot it into your mouth and like it's this it's this medicine and he turns it into like this whole thing so he wins with jaeger and then when he's in his 70s he's like
you know what i'm gonna do co-found a new startup and he decides i'm gonna go for vodka and his process to create gray goose was go find me the highest priced bottle of vodka what is it they're like oh it's absolute he's like what's the price he's like great we're 50 more than that that's thing number one we know he goes thing two uh we want to be top shelf so he's like we need a how how big is the shelf, uh, height? We need to be taller than that. So the only place you could put it is the top shelf. Um, it has to sit up there. So he designs the bottle and they're like, uh, okay, we're working on the bottle. We don't even have the vodka. He's like, don't worry, we're going to get the vodka, go to France and get the vodka. They're like, vodka is made in Russia. He's like, yeah, but who wants that dirty Russian vodka? Imagine French vodka.
And they're like, okay. He's like, go find me some French vodka. And so they go find it. And that was basically how he created Grey Goose was those three elements working backwards and creating it uh it's really wild this guy lived a wild life this guy sydney frank like he was he got so old but he just loved having a good time he loved golfing so when he couldn't golf he would just pay four pro golfers to like golf on his behalf and they would like kind of carry We'll share him out onto the course, and he would fly private with these guys. They would just have a good time, but all the videos of him are kind of like, even in his 90s, being carried into the car, having a great time. This guy lived a big life.
Meanwhile, there is someone having their fifth hour of conversations about their business plan with ChatGP2 today. But that's kind of that, how deep does it go? It's like, well, marketing will disillusion you, right? Because you realize all these everyday products that are so popular.
“taste is the ability to discern between good and not good.”
it's interesting around the uh this is seen as low effort because that john mark uh guy broke the fucking internet the first one of him where he's shadowboxing and he's just like he's sort of doing like a little dance but everyone was completely mystified by this guy like there's so much aura until you found out it was AI. So the same thing, but finding out, I mean, if you watch Hoog or Fern or any of these big explainer YouTube channels, I love their documentaries. I think that they're great. They put a disclaimer at the very start that says all of our animation is done by humans because they need to show effort upfront because the gap in terms of output, like finished article is difficult to determine for us. So what I have to do is basically say, even if you can't tell, the proof of work is there to show that we put a lot of effort into making this. Did I send you the Gossip Goblin thing? The Love Island thing? What's that? Now go on. Can you find Gossip Goblin on Instagram? I love that name. What is it? This is like AI film and it's like, you're not going
to mistake it for not being ai film but the level of craft is absolutely unbelievable right and so they're they're taking something that people would typically see as low effort and slop but pushing it to its absolute limit and i would say they're putting in like a level of effort in the production that you would associate with like any kind of like s-tier hollywood production studio you'll see in these outputs like so like what kind of birds are you into love you like them all sexy and stuff um uh i uh well all types yeah i love all birds uh girls but um yeah if i had to pick i'd say i like the pretty ones when these look all sexy and stuff are you calling me fit you're so sweet potsy you nasty slag how could you gorbo's my man Welcome to Lover's Lagoon, a show where Nero Cradle's finest, flirtiest, and feistiest singles fight, fornicate, and find love.
So come on and take your hand out of your pants, and let's go meet the cast. Been a rough year, not gonna lie. Me hairline wobbled, my cortisol got nervous, and the gooning got bad. Real bad. But I've locked in now, and I'm ready to stop jester-maxing and start mogging, bruv. I'm a proper gent. I treat every bird like a princess and her father like an absolute king. Manners cost nothing, sweetheart. I mean, it's even got... I wouldn't say I'm full of myself, but I'm the fittest sort here, aren't I? It's just maths, innit? Don't know, really. Nice villa, though, yeah? I'm a romantic, I am. When a fella pulls out a chair for me or opens a door, boom!
me fanny flutters and i'm already planning our baby's names what's crazy is this is such a strong like except for him i was about to say what i was about to say was um the ability to distill uh stereotypes like british each of those is an archetype that exists uh but yeah i mean i don't know are people ever going to say this is ai this is something which is typically low effort but you've done it in a way which is high effort therefore i'm gonna give you i think there's so much ick around ai generally that you're never really gonna no matter how good that's short term yeah i just i agree i think there will be always like the new organic or free range is like handmade is you know it's human made basically they're gonna there's gonna be a word for this like you know i think rory was talking about how like horsepower became a phrase because they needed to describe the speed of something and they could only describe it relative to the units of something pretty good one and horsepower was needed and like i think the ai industry needs its version of horsepower it's like it needs to it needs this prediction markets yeah it's like these evals are all so complicated nobody knows what the hell how which one's better what it should
just be an iq right they need to come up with a number that's like we got 99 they have 98 supreme intelligence you see the poll the trump oh yeah the rebrand oh yeah he's trying he's trying he's the head of the game a savant oh yeah he was trying to name it something else supreme intelligence supreme was one and then the other one was um i can't remember he wanted to call it asi but the problem is ASI means artificial super intelligence, which is the thing that everyone's worried about. Yeah, it wasn't super. It was supreme, and then it was, like, superior. Yeah, but there's, like, three words he brought up.
I think the big thing is the artificial, which makes sense. It's not the best branding. I mean, he knows his branding, yeah. Yeah. Interesting. What was your list? My thingy's not working. Carry on without me. Machine intelligence was another one that I've, like, but again, that has the, like, we're getting replaced. What's this? Here's a... Is that a gram? New pickle. What do you think? Woo-hoo. Very nice. Look at that. Picked them up from the deli yesterday. Good coloring. That's dill. And the brine is something called mustard seed. It's very cool, Bateman. But that's nothing. Look at this. That is really nice.
Half sour with garlic brine. What do you think? Nice. Jesus. That is really super. How'd a nitwit like you get so tasteful? I can't believe that Bryce prefers Van Patten's pickle to mine. Wait. You ain't seen nothing yet. Barrel cured. Whole peppercorn. Extra crisp. Impressive. Very nice. Let's see Paul Allen's pickle. I want to know how they put the pickles away. Look at that subtle olive coloring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh my God. It even has little bumps. something wrong patrick you're sweating jesus fucking yeah it is over it is so it is so close to being over uh i had uh speaking of tasteful alex wang in crocs did you see this i didn't i did look at the breakdown and the breakdown of the breakdown this one yeah yep so meta's chief a.i officer alexander wang stole the show at medic connect by wearing a pair of camo crocs and a camo t-shirt let's have a look yeah just dress for the job you want dude it is so true So, and keep going. Meta invested $60 billion into the Metaverse, almost ran out of business, then Zuck, hide the camo Crocs intern, and suddenly everything's fixed. He's just replied and said, Gen Z riser. He has a fact checker. He's on a heater right now.
What I have seen, I mean, speaking as a man that really, really fucking likes Crocs, in some airports, you're not allowed to wear them on the escalators. Is that right? Because, you know at the end of an escalator where there's sort of like the teeth of the the combs come together sometimes people's feet get stuck and if you've got this in sport mode and your this starts getting eaten like people have like really injured themselves yeah just ripped your own foot apart from this but uh that's why sport mode is only to be used in extreme circumstances that's my piece of advice wow from an avid croc wearer gotta be careful in other news if you're trying to go from Joey Chestnut to Joey Swole, the RP Strength app is the best place to start. I've been in the gym for 20 years and it wasn't until the past few years that I had the best training sessions of my life and RP was a massive part of that. Actual scientists built this thing around one obsession to beat up their high school bullies and provide the most science-backed effective path to maximizing muscle gain. It tells you your exercises, how many sets, reps, and weights that you need to do, everything. So all that you have to do is show up and lift. If the RP app could
wipe your ass for you, it probably would. And it adjusts automatically every week based on how you're actually progressing. For me, following a proper evidence-based plan has made a massive difference. And if you're serious about training, it'll do the same for you too. Right now, you can get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below or heading to rpstrength.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's rpstrength.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. A little micro essay I was going to send you boys about um the convergence or everything is either porn or a casino let me try and find it this is your idea that the uk is peak vape vape shop energy yeah there's a the number of vape shops and betting shops when i was back is truly absurd yeah it's not a great indicator is it show me your high street and i'll show you country this is it the the the um the twitter handle is k-t-r-i-v-s and the article the article is called everything is guna casino Head the ability to write good headlines since Substack and Twitter articles have come around.
Here we go. Everything is Goona. Yeah, yeah, this is it. When I read Jason's tweet on the weekend, I was so viscerally yucked. The last thing you want to see is a middle-aged man who could be your father tweeting about Goona content on the timeline. Jason, at Sydney Sweeney, launches an OnlyFans competitor and she's instantly the world's richest woman. I don't agree with this thesis here, but that's a convo for another day. It seems like if you're a builder right now, you have two options, creating Goona slop or building a casino. and if you're feeling ambitious and want real pmf what's pmf product market you have some you have some combination of both 50 cent the saying goes sex sells this is not a new concept advertisers marketers record labels and notable rappers have been pushing this agenda on us since the beginning of time i vividly remember watching music videos as a child with 50 cent this video vixens dancing in the background back when music videos was still a thing you couldn't find one without hot women the formula is quite simple find a product find a hot person and create an ad with both pictured and boom, you have people's attention. This was what virality looked like
before we had manufactured algorithms and influencers doing the work for us on TikTok. Tom Ford took the concept very literally in his iconic 2007 campaign for Tom Ford for men. The ads were considered too sexy. Magazines refused to run them, yet they're still one of the clearest and most iconic examples of sex selling to date. Tom Ford in 2000. It's pretty long, but if you go down, there's a two by two matrix that I think will illustrate. will illustrate but it's obviously based off the on the back of the sydney sweeney stuff but this i have seen this okay so it's a matrix pornography to not pornography on the y-axis casino to not casino on the x-axis and then maybe the next couple paragraphs will sum it up but i love how grinders off the charts but this is a great meme too yeah on one side it's polymarket and on the other side it's only fans it seems like the modern man's brain has been fried and this has all been turned into a weird slot machine lab rat experiment gone wrong the future seems dark but there are two directions we can go and i'm hopeful we can start course correcting if it's not already too late everyone has a responsibility in the future they build i'll leave you here with a
quote from one of my colleagues when you're working in crypto real bravery is refusing to build the slot machine if you can build anything what's worth building be brave are you tempted to build the slot machine you work in crypto uh i mean it's there's a very fine line between like the frictionless commerce component and the just like pure speculation Well, you could always just get away with it and be like, it's a commentary on the state of things. You have a free pass. Yeah, I think what's interesting about crypto art specifically and its relationship to the quote-unquote real art world is money, attention, the manufacturing of attention around work in the traditional art world is the same thing is happening, just at a slower pace.
you know like the idea that what we talked about an hour ago or so the the way you put an artist's work into the spotlight is by increasing demand around it and sort of structuring a market around it and what crypto art has done is like somewhat democratize the ability for you to do that and like get collectors to participate in your work and uh yeah i feel like there have been in the last eight, nine years that this has been happening, I strongly believe there's already work in crypto that will be the most valuable artwork that has existed ever. Already is, potentially. But you know CryptoPunks, you're familiar with them. If you think about a portrait in a traditional sense like uh um like the da vinci salvador monday sold for 450 million bucks in 2021 i think to like a shake or some like someone in the uae and if you like extrapolate that or you sort of marry that up to like a crypto punks as an analogy if a crypto punk is a hundred thousand dollars one of them and you think of it as one project or one object that collection is worth a billion dollars and it's liquid like you could buy and sell one right now for that price if the salvador monday came back to market would it sell for a billion dollars
maybe but these things are eight years old already yeah so i like i have a yeah i have a strong belief in it to the point where like i've you know pivoted a lot of my work into that world despite it being a reputationally fraught environment for sure. But it's a very real thing in some pockets and corners. But because of the permissionless nature of it, it's like anything. It's like you're going to get 99% carnage, slop, whatever you want to call it. like you bring the barrier down then it's it's uh you get You know, one of the two things I wanted to ask you guys kind of related to that article just then is two, you've got four kids, three kids, and there's this whole very much pessimism right now around devices and casinos or porn and addiction and all this sort of stuff. But you two are like very kind of optimistic, a little bit more nuanced of all my friends. How are you thinking about kids with devices and using all these things as well as like education as a whole, like bringing kids into this?
Because people are making out like it's the worst time ever to be alive, which I disagree with. But it's this kind of media narrative. To be what age? To be like a kid? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I think to be like a college age kid right now would be very hard. But I think like- I would agree. I think the like growing pains- I don't understand. Like if you've committed to being taught whatever discipline in the like traditional way it's being taught and- What was your major? Graphic communication, it was called. Oh, wow. Okay. That's pretty spot on. Yeah. What did you do? Philosophy. Philosophy?
Two business degrees. Okay. All right. Maybe you guys all used your degrees. I was biology. I didn't use my degree. I don't know. Damn. I don't know almost anyone that like in my life that- I guess I'm talking about vocational stuff more. The thing they studied turned out to be what they did with the rest of their life. Because you're told to pick when you're 17, 18. In the US, you major your freshman year of college. So you're 17 or 18 years old and you pick a track with no knowledge. Hey, person that was only recently a child, decide the rest of the direction your life's going to go in. This is the arranged marriage of like, yeah, I guess that's a good point. I think maybe it is like, should push you more in the direction of like, I want to do philosophy or I want to study literature or like the, you know, go into, to study. I think there's a whole set of attitudes that might be true, but don't serve you. And it's better to just reject them. Meaning, uh, you know, you could think of, uh, this, this, like a breakup is a breakup, the end or the beginning you could argue either way one of them is going to serve you if you see this as the beginning the beginning of the next chapter where i really understand what i want i'm going to find the
right person and i'm going to be better because of all this or is it the end which is what most people default to and so it's like if you i think it's kind of what you're talking about earlier of you know what's a thing that if you if you got that wrong kind of doesn't matter what else you do it's like if you're added this is the worst time ever to be alive or to be a kid or to be a college graduate it's like good luck with the rest of that paragraph because your opening sentence didn't screw you you know so it's like you really have no choice but to just say it's the best time ever to be a college student why and then start brainstorming from there and then use that like Actually, it's one of the ideas that I was pretty interested in recently was I read this substack about strong links versus weak link theory.
I was like, oh, what does that mean? And so what the guy argues, he's like, there are plenty of systems in the world where you really have to focus on the weak link of the system. So he's like, airport security. You're only as good as your weakest link. Jet engine design. Only as good as your weakest link. Food safety. It's like you have to be. so there's a whole set of systems that the incentive and the important thing is to focus on your weakest link and make it better he's like but then and so and a lot of people even say that you're only as good as your weakest link but so you just think that applies to everything it's like but there's a whole set of things that are the exact opposite it's strong link theory so he's like music let's say you get you know an artist album you know like the beatles the beatles have made like whatever a thousand songs even people who are like i love the beatles can name you know a dozen off the top of their head and so like for a musician it doesn't really matter how many bad songs you make the only bad thing matters did you make one banger song right did you get any strong links in your thread and so strong links apply to all these other things science
is actually very interesting he's like the scientific community is like so uptight about publishing papers and like replication all this that they've focused so much on weak links meaning the the smartest people believe what you should do is try to disqualify as much bad i bad theories bad hypotheses as you can versus realizing that like all we care about in science is actually breakthroughs and improve human lives which only come when you are actually just scanning for the strong link that actually works versus focusing on like you know negating any possible bad bad paper um and it's like oh yeah that's actually kind of true and you need to know which game you're in to be able to optimize for you know so like i think it's kind of the same thing like in you know college students or whoever it is that are trying to figure out what to do like you can't you have to find the strong link theory of what you're doing and like oh now i can do that yeah well that changes everything for me and even if these other nine things don't are now not going my way this one is enough to make up for the other nine that are now against me i agree with the like agency component at the individual level i suppose my
comment is like the curriculum at the university moving fast enough to be like hey guy this exists now how can we rethink it or is it like we've been teaching it the way this way for this long and we're going to continue to do that that's the like muddy water but if you're in the position to be like actually you know i see this as like whatever i'm doing i can actually Fulfill my university obligations in- That's why Alpha School, the idea of it, is so great. Because they were like, how long does school actually take? How long do you need to learn every day? And if the number is the same as it was 50 years ago, what the hell?
Something's gone wrong. I talked to a dentist. He's like, it's crazy that dental school is still the same exact amount of time. How is it possible that we train people the exact amount of time? Nothing has improved in our training ability. We got the internet, we got computers, we got zero efficiency. the map around town like that's insane like and it costs more and it costs more yeah it's like obviously the incentive is keep you there charge you as much as you can like versus the opposite whereas alpha school is like all right if the students were only on the like learning two hours a day what could you teach how how well could you teach them two hours and it turns out like they do two grades of progress in every one year with only two hours a day so you're using whatever one-fourth the time and making double progress so it's crazy how you if you go down an age to like younger ages how are you two thinking about devices and education for kids we have zero devices zero yeah no tv no device at this age would you like to meet my nanny my pacifier my if i'm at a restaurant i'm trying to like have a conversation with my wife like okay take the phone play a game i play i play a lot of video games with my kids um i think that's like part
of it is i use it with them like i will not give them social media because i know like how if my brain cannot resist the social temptations of trying to be seen as popular on social media and developing and just consuming like consuming consuming consuming because there's no chance they have they stand no chance so like to me i'm like that's cigarettes i'm not going to give my total cigarettes but i have myself plus met so many people that played a lot of video games growing up and like you get a lot of benefits like i played a lot of poker growing up it's not really the most like my mom wasn't that happy it's kind of a degenerate activity but you do gain a lot if you're able to like control the dose so i think it's like you know you got to control the dose but everybody's got a different dose some people think an hour a week is a lot there's a study that i saw this morning on x that's going around it's trending at the moment mark you might be able to pull this up it's a number of brain scans based on how many hours per day people use might be screens or it might be social media less than one versus one to two versus three to four versus four and over and uh it it just i think everybody is concerned about what it does to kids
the thing that i would be most worried about that i think i would find most difficult if
“you give the student five LLM outputs and they have to just tell you which one is the best and why.”
when we all worked and did manual labor. Interesting. Like the idea of like coming home from the field and be like, let me just get a quick pump. That wasn't a thing. It's like, I just slogged in the field all day. It's when we all stopped slogging in the fields and the mines that we had to like, we were just sitting all day. We had to come up with a place to go to go pick up heavy objects and put them back down is that what's gonna happen like are we going to brain gyms where artificial cognitive friction yeah like you go do sudoku and shit and like you're it's like oh yeah they lock up the device and you have to get an hour in i'm like man i got such a good brain pump today yeah you know what i mean that's a great that's what's gonna happen that's a great point but there isn't as much uh bottle service upside to the brain gym straight and also you can't see you know what i mean my big theory about the gym about why it's so popular for a lot of people especially bodybuilding you need belts like jujitsu or something yeah exactly you need
some other like i grade it i grade it the karate kid of soku that guy thinks The advantage of going to the gym is that you get a pump, which is a preview of what you will be like if you keep doing it. It's not the same when you try to learn Italian. During the process of doing your Italian class or Duolingo or whatever, you're not briefly six months progressed in Italian. No, you do a puzzle. I do a puzzle. I feel absolute dopamine when I solve a little slider puzzle. i understand but that's not the same as when you go into the gym you lift something and you're like if i keep going i will walk around looking like i do now having just finished my training session with a pump in six months this is your experience at the gym my experience is wildly different than yours no you have this euphoric experience like this is who i am i feel great coming myself yeah i go to the gym and i look at myself i'm like oh my god what can somebody turn the mirror around what's going on but the like project regardless of how you experience it the projection like the utility that my physique is going to give me is going to be way higher than the the utility of one iq point in a world where intelligence is free but people meditate not many people pretend
to or they want to they try to they say they do well you could have it if you could actually um mri or scan your brain as soon as that becomes more that that could become the flex i'm like and it might be it might be like the you know the the january gym signups with the brain gym it might be just purely you know the direct debit coming out makes you feel good about wanting to increase the increase on your front lobe exactly there was a did you ever use that muse headband back in the day me johnny and you said for on it do you have you seen this so it was a e e g e k g brain uh thing so kind of like a headband yeah yeah this is it uh forge the skill of attention measure track and improve your most valuable asset used by nasa harvard and over a thousand plus research labs trained on a billion minutes of of data yeah so this is focus see when your mind drifts train it back endurance train mental stamina with fnirs sleep uh oh wow they've really tuned this thing back in the day the muse 2 the top right thing was what we used to use that thing that was what we used to use which was for um uh meditation and you would put this on and it would have little bird sounds when you were locked in.
The sound would get louder as you were more distracted and then as your brainwaves quiet. I have no idea if this is. It's not even possible. I don't even know if it worked. We were all adamant this is going to be the fix for my meditation technique and do all the rest of it. But yeah, you can see the active, neutral, calm. What was your quote? All the gear and- No idea. Yeah, it's easy to not be distracted when anybody attractive will leave the room. Unless you have a colored version of it that shows you have a black belt. it's a black belt i don't think there's a i don't think there's much overlap unfortunately i like intellect has not been a it's like very unusual for it to be like primarily sought after sought after thing like the the the outcomes of intellect are more but maybe that shifts like wasn't it back in the day like being fat was uh yes attractive because it was a signal of wealth yeah and then like that changed as we got abundant and then you know what's it do you think maybe it's my time are you saying that being stupid in future could be a signal of high status that you have to think so little because all of your army of ai agents are just thinking on your behalf oh my god you must have a chat gpt pro membership like he's he's so
post money he's so post economic a little quicker quicker question question um what's an idea you've changed your mind upon in the last 12, 24, six, three months? Just something you used to hold quite strongly, or you no longer hold? An idea you've changed your mind on? Mm-hmm. Do you have one to lead us off, warm us up? No. No. Okay. Brilliant. All right. Thank you. You've got to give us a little time. What process we've got. The longer you sit in silence, the more sophisticated what you're about to say sounds. definitely sounds but it not necessarily is yeah correct yeah but it's all about appearances christopher yeah but i benefit from low expectations um what the fuck have i changed my mind on i think i just had it all right oh yeah yeah that's a big one sorry i'm not a good guy to ask still right don't have to be somewhat big it could be something small uh something that is relatively it's just a bit surprising from like a cultural perspective is i i think that there is increasing like cool alpha available in being a moderate democrat like a moderate left-leaning person at the moment i think that the this that you see. Yeah, maybe people don't like the 5am call to prayer in New York from Mamdani. And
like, maybe his optics are a bit bad. And maybe he's like a faux socialist. And maybe Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a little bit whatever. But like all of these people are like normalizing their memes in a way that isn't being mocked. So like AOC breaks off her engagement, freezes her eggs, starts live streaming it. Yeah, people are like, well, there's hypocrisy here because there were free vasectomies outside of the DNC last year. And like, you know, you don't really seem to care about birth rates and but like pretty quickly it was like yeah but she looks hot in yoga clothes you know like she became her own meme a little bit and people like she's got her place within the culture and the same thing with mamdani like i think if you were to go two years ago right just before the 24 election on the left it was all about mockery wokeism overreach all of this stuff And when I see, when I sort of track the world of left versus right, now when you think about what the right are talking about, it feels very boomery because it feels out of touch because it's like, are you still bringing up like this thing about, have we not already done the like, oh, woke people and progressive stuff?
like it just feels like beating a dead horse so um at least the positioning of people that are left of center now that are moderate not the insane ones um i think is less cringe to be associated with and seems to be like culturally more except you're seeing more left-leaning comedians that are doing more left-leaning jokes like uh mike rice and vittorio from the uk both like you know uh um jacob and jake from screen rot that's just the uk right and then you come over here and there's like a variety like trevor noah these guys are more widely accepted not that trevor's been like he's a fucking superstar obviously but uh that that was like a not me changing my mind but something that i've noticed as a cultural switch do you think that because whatever uh is sexy cool rock and roll is counter power counterculture to a degree it's it's always sexier to be outside of the tent pissing on it than inside of the tent fighting against each other like you've seen the right has fractured itself into oblivion now because they're in power uh and the left is like counterculture and they're pushing back against this thing i also think that a good chunk of it is just trump has not exactly showered himself in glory he's maybe showered
himself in something else it's just not it's such a face plant after face plant against the fundamental principles that lots of people wanted him for and why people want to get him in it's like all of this crossover and like people that were never like never woke I don't know. being like anti-Trump now, or at least like Trump skeptical, Trump adjacent, Trump skeptical adjacent. That's just like, I don't know. It's interesting for me to watch that because we really had a period of ascendancy in terms of progressiveness and the pushback against that, which was kind of like the atheism of the mid 2010s, like atheism from like the 2000s into the mid 2010s was religion's kind of stupid man. And like, I'm like rational and stuff. And you've got long-termism, like, you know, scientism comes through, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and stuff. And then quite quickly that pivots to like, maybe quite a lot of baby got thrown out with that bathwater. I'm not so sure that that was a great idea. And Latin mass is now the most descendant new type of religious service, even though no one, literally no one speaks the language that it's being spoken in. I think that's actually a feature, not a bug. I think
the reason that people like it is that their scientism and their rationality isn't able to get in the way of the experience because they're not, you know, they can't scrutinize or be skeptical or cynical or whatever about how it's working and that that swing that same sort of sense well like the cool kid rational position was always to be well you know there's like two types of there's men and there's women and like these people are silly whatever and now that it's just less cool to still be beating that drum not that the fundamental but the fundamental principle has been accepted and now we're looking at okay well what's next like is there a different way to do that and i think uh people that assume that a like right wing slam dunk in 28 is a certainty i think that that's that there's a potential for a really fucking huge upset for for all of those people so that's at least something that i've noticed over the last yeah that's a good answer i thought of one go on it's kind of like this so what i changed my mind on i'm not a very like you're talking about religion i'm not a very religious person i posted a tweet the other day and I just said, do you believe in God?
Yes or no? And what do you think my Twitter audience answered that? What percentage said yes? I'd say 35%, 30%? 40. 30, 40. I was going to go 60. Yeah, you're closest. It was like 75% said yes. I was pretty stunned by this. 74, yeah, 74% said yes. 3,000 votes as well. 3,000 votes, which is like my audience is, I would have guessed leaned a different way. Yeah, yeah. um and i've bumped into a lot of people but specifically there was a guy who came on the podcast that was talking about he had studied and read um of people who had had near-death encounters, NDE's. And so it was somebody who died for 15 minutes and was resuscitated, or it was like, you know, they were out and they were on the brink and then they came back.
And it's like, not a lot of these people, but they're fascinating. So people go study, like, what'd you see? What happened? And one of the interesting things that he says is commonly, it's like alien spottings where different people say the same thing. You all say it flew this way. Like that's, how did you guys all coordinate that answer? um so the thing that popped up was this idea of your life flashes before your eyes but not in the traditional sense so what when people say that you know my life flashed before my eyes they think you're watching some replay of your life or highlight reel of your life all the key moments of your life and actually what these people say is uh the opposite that basically um you see the events of your life but from the point of view of the other person in the scene like so if you're having a conference if i was having a conversation with you when i thought i would see the same conversation but from your perspective and it brings up this like really interesting idea of what is heaven and hell so like imagine you had left people these amazing encounters with you and you left them feeling good then it would look it would feel like heaven because you would get this replay this barrage of the wonderful impact you had on
all these other people and if you were an asshole you would feel it would you would see yourself and feel from their point of view how you made them how you made them feel and it's it's karma but like productized it's like the actual like manifestation that like the the shot version of karma where you had to blitz through and experience that and it would feel like hell and so like i i haven't looked into it i haven't gone read like he mentioned a couple of books and and whatnot i'm going to go read but it was the first time the idea of heaven and hell didn't feel like a thing that i would tell my kids to scare them into behaving well it was like if that actually does it does happen and like i've experienced things like deja vu that i can't explain i'm like i have i viscery felt this i don't know what the science is but that shit has happened to me many times so this idea of like your life flash before you guys are seeing something like you know very quickly in this like weird lucid dreaming type of way i've kind of experienced that in deja vu if that's what happens when you die and i just kind of i almost like the idea of this like visual karma you know this this uh this blitz through your life and again it's kind of
like i don't know if it's true or not but it definitely serves me if i believed that that was if i kept that thought in mind as i walked through life it's a very different thing than the me centered version of like who am i what was my life? How is this going? What are all the best things I did? It's such an amateur looking way of thinking about life versus this other way. Question. Who do you know that you think would experience the most heaven at the end of their life if that was the sort of experience that? I told you yesterday about my friend Ramon. You know Ramon? Ramon is this absolute gem of a guy. He's a single father. He's like the best friend to any of us. Like just shows up for everybody. Uh, almost to a literal extent, my, my buddy had a baby and he heard that they were going to labor and like, just bought it before he could even think, just bought a plane ticket, came down, showed up at the hospital and was just like with gifts and like, had, you know, they were like, Hey, we're like still, you know, she's kind of still naked. Like, you know, he goes to their house and just like decorates it. You know, he's just like an incredible friend.
And he's, I was telling Chris, like he not only coached like his kids sports team, but even when his kid kind of graduated, he was such a good coach that the community, like he kind of realized that if I, if I don't do this, nobody's really a step up. So he just kept coaching other kids for no reason. He's just constantly been that guy for other people. And I told Chris this idea of greatness is not accomplishing something great. It's being great. Just like showing up and being great right here in this situation with the barista, with the old lady in line, with this, with that. and I think that if it was like if you flashed a million of those small things it'd be like those flip books where any one page looks like nothing but the whole thing when you see it you're like wow that was incredible and I think his life would look like that wow if I had to guess he has like quite high theory of mind so he could probably think how Sean thinks or is that kind of theory of mind it seems to come online around about four or five so I'm sure you guys have experienced this. When you're watching the TV, there's a three-year-old in the room. The three-year-old will happily walk in front of the TV and they genuinely can't comprehend that your views aren't
the same. Their world is the worldview. And there's something about four or five that it comes online. But what was interesting, I look at theory of mind kind of like writing, because writing comes online about four or five. And most 42-year-olds have a higher theory of mind than a five-year-old, but also william shakespeare wrote mcbeth 42 so like there's like it can still keep on like compounding and i think like a lot of people with theory like most uh 42 year olds will have a better theory of mind than a five-year-old but they kind of might think and it's so easy to fall into that barista is this kind of automaton. Right. That's getting in the way of my life. Oh no, this person was up till 3am last night. Right. And trying to see the world. Not only is not only you a little bit more empathetic, it's actually a more accurate worldview. You kind of move to like the earth being the center of the universe to know where the earth is. And not only is that actually humbling, which is kind of the whole grateful blah, blah, blah shit, but it's actually the accurate model of physics. Right. Therefore, you're more likely to make more accurate predictions as well. Yeah. I just on that one life hack that I've never actually thought about properly, but
I've just like reverse engineered from the last couple of years of life. Every so often leaving an absurdly big tip, if you can afford it is I think about the times that I've done that. I still think about them now, not in a very gratuitous way, but there was one time that, uh, I, I know you've got a story from Dubai when you left Dubai, which kind of inspired this. Uh, I was in New York on tour last year and this lady came in and she was talking to us about how she'd basically finished the night shift and it was 10 AM, 10 30 AM. And this was the, the double shift, but going from night to day, as opposed to from day to night. And we left like, I left a very big tip and I was like, just, can we make sure that it goes to the person that was the server? I did it uh before a podcast a couple of years ago in florida when i was near chris bumstead's house in a denny's so the guy was just like so great and and and you know really really lovely guy that just as a life hack generally i'm aware this is not as big as maybe getting on a plane and going and decorating somebody's house and it is kind of transactional and flippant it doesn't still require that much emotional involvement but if you're on the path to learning to be a better
a more pro-social human. I think this is a good, hey, like if you can do a 30% or a hundred percent tip on, on a meal, like that, I like the idea of that more than I like the idea of regularly doing 25% tips. Yes. Because the impact of that is going to be so much more. So, uh, this is crazy you said that, like, even when I was just trying to explain, like, it's like, try to explain why Gandhi is great. It's like, um, hold on. Uh, and I'm trying to pick random examples. I can't even think of it. But last night we're hanging out, we're on this boys trip. And so for the boys trip, each guy kind of contributed one segment of the trip. So it's like, I was like, oh, we're going to go do this. One guy's like, we're going to go to a Muay Thai gym and spar each other. We're going to go to Barton Springs and go swim, whatever. And so one of the things he did extra, he was like, um, He brought a thousand dollars of cash and he's like, you know, this is a thing that I do with my son. And he's like, you know, maybe once every couple of weeks, we'll go get some cash at the ATM. And he's like, I just want him to learn like the joy of giving. And so he's like, we spend the rest of the day, we start in the morning and he's like, we spend the rest of the day, like trying to figure out how we can give this to like light anybody up to really like make a difference in anybody's life that we see.
And he's like, sometimes we just go buy dog food and we give it away to dogs in the shelter. Sometimes we pay for groceries and just stay here till till it runs out. But like, you know, whatever. And he's like, you know, I just do this because I want my son to learn that. But I was his son yesterday where he's like, you know, he hands us the money. And I'm like, it was this is the hardest part. It was harder than sparring was figuring out how to do this. It was like a lot of pressure. How do I give this? How do I give this? And how do I do it well? and how do i do it like actually with some grace and some poise and not like make the other person feel weird and how do i get over my own hesitation it's like this is literally his money he's handed to me it's for this purpose but i'm like oh no not that something better than that they're not going to use it well it's like what the hell is wrong with me right like building this muscle i really haven't used in this way so i i totally agree and you know we ended up where we took the like you know the bike pedicab things at night so we're like cruising around austin and the woman happened you know we don't kind of already given some of the money way whatever but she was like
um she was telling us like you know she had lost her job and she's like yeah so i just started doing this it's like i don't really have a better idea yet but like all right i'll get on this bike and i'll pedal and i'll think while i'm pedaling and i'll enjoy i'll meet some cool people and so you know so fulfilling just to give a little bit and give without hesitation um but you're you're right like um that's a very practical way to do this thing that like sounds good in theory to like be a good person okay but how it's like well here's like different moments different ways yeah and it's like such a simple one anyone can access can you tell that story of when you left Dubai I don't think you've ever told this publicly because it's one of those weird ones um but when I was in um I was leaving I was in Dubai for a few months I was leaving for the summer and whilst I was there I was in this hotel building and there was a gym next door and I'd walk to the gym each day and there was a guy on like the parking attendant who I would see each day you know some people you get like a nod he would give me like a salute each time it's like a different thing each time and we never spoke to another but every day i'd walk to the gym i'd see
him i'd give him a wave and he'd give me like that or he'd give me a different salute and i just go this guy i'd always like have a bad zoom call or something could go wrong i see this guy i go this is great we did it for months we never spoke but he just do it i need to give that guy a tip before I got it. And I was in bed on my final night, and I was watching Liam Neeson, Taken. And my flight was in six hours. It's the wrong film to watch when you fight. Because I'm fucking wired. I'm like, I want to be Liam Neeson. I'm like, oh, shit. I forgot to give him this guy the tip. I'm like, am I going to leave a flight in six hours? Am I going to go and leave to go and give this guy the tip? I'm like, yes, I am. So I get an Uber, pull it up. I don't even know if he's going to be on the shift. It's like 11 p.m.
but i get an uber wait for the uber to come gets delayed the uber gets cancelled another uber comes i'm like right my flight's like five hours now getting an uber 20 minutes down to go and see this old gym i used to go to to see if this guy's there and i'm wandering around there's loads of people at bars and nightclubs i'm like okay i'm literally just trying to find this guy i'm looking i'm looking i'm looking and i go i see him and i go right and i go to the cash machine and i got out because at the time i didn't have a crazy amount of money and i was like okay i'm just gonna give him that so i walk over to him i go i know we never speak but you give me a lovely salute every single day here you go i shake his hand and walk away and immediately someone's behind me and then uh he's um uh i'm getting a uber back so he hasn't even really looked at the money um he then uh carries on talking to the person who comes through i'm waiting for this uber and i go i don't think he even saw what i've given him and i go and like walk back and he's just broken down like in floods of tears and we just fucking pug it out and it was i still think about that story still gives me goosebumps a bit and it was like i don't know it was an absurd
amount of money but it was uh it was in hindsight i should have given more right uh i did i love that story i really do love that story change your mindy anything my stuff this is not gonna be anywhere near as profound when i was thinking about when you first asked it was just all like
“And then it comes back two minutes later. It's like, yeah, you actually owed $2,000. Would you like me to file the claim?”
shit done. What have you changed your mind on? Oh, one of them is, I think a lot of people have
“could you like fuck everything up and people would still buy from you”
the keyboard's gone to fuck uh siri has gotten worse yeah as far as i can see over the last sort of five to ten years uh the apple intelligence thing was a complete flop i hate the liquid glass like i hate that but they had so much headroom right and the integration is so good the fact that i can have my notes here on this and like everything my passwords it's so perfectly put together in the ecosystem that even with doing that and we've talked about this as well that there's the inertia of having vestigial past love for someone a creator that releases a course and then just face plants over and over again like the creator equivalent of a Kanye West and you're like fuck I guess I'll still listen to them I guess I'll still watch their stuff because there's just so much goodwill that's brought up and it's interesting like how big is the bank account of this person that they can continue to withdraw from socially right before they get into negative equity and it's like some people essentially just have an infinite money glitch an infinite social
money glitch and there's no amount of foot in mouthing that they can do that doesn't cause them to like didn't trump even say this he's like i could walk down fifth street and take out a gun and shoot somebody in the head and they would still love me he said something like this right like when he was in his first campaign it was like a crazy statement dana dana white's got plot armor in the same way like who else can get into a domestic altercation in public with their wife and just then whatever the next day or the day after just own it and be like wasn't me at my best wasn't her at our best spoken to our sons about it you know love her blah blah blah and then next day he's like right so UFC 203 and you're like oh my god this guy's just got a lot of self-awareness which is Alex O'Connor's idea that you can get away with anything on the internet if you're sufficiently self-aware um Bryan Johnson can get away with anything on the internet as long as a sufficiently self-aware.
Mike O'Hearn is the same thing. Do you think Trump is self-aware? That's different. I think that's conviction. That's conviction and congruence. It's a barbell. Either zero self-awareness or zero self-awareness. Boys, I love you all. Where should people go? You've got a new project out. Yeah. Where should people go to check it out? Just go to Twitter. Jack Butcher on Twitter, please. Heck yeah. Get off Twitter, social media, go read a book. Good book. i recommend is think on these things by krishnamurti it's a good book heck yeah if you like good books um highagency.com forward slash books all my favorite books boys i love you this is awesome this stuff rules and that's it let's go thank you goodbye my beauties blam blam dude


